Drawing on his experience as a planter, Father Jean-Baptiste Labat (1663–1738) disentangled details about sugar cultivation and production from the limited discussions found in natural histories and travel accounts to create a full-fledged planters manual in Nouveau Voyage aux isles de l’Amérique (1722). Elie Monnereau did the same for indigo in L’art de l’indigotier (1765), which detailed the “art” of cultivation and processing and the “science” of plantation management, including the regulation of enslaved laborers. His treatise also suggested how his peers shared information through manuscripts; his visual representation of indigo production, superior to previous versions, became a model for others after influencing Beauvais-Raseau’s L’art de l’indigotier (1770), published by the Académie Royale des Sciences. Discussion of Labat and Monnereau/Beauvais-Raseau demonstrates how Caribbean agriculturalists addressed the problems common to anyone seeking to communicate practical and technical information: What elements of a description made it particularly informative? What should an illustration include to make it most useful? How could text and illustration together facilitate communication? Discussion of Monnereau’s and Beauvais-Raseau’s treatises also underscore the differences between colonial and metropolitan agendas in the production and promulgation of agricultural knowledge.

This chapter moves to the French Enlightenment, arguing that echoes of Renaissance humanism emerge in the Encyclopédie. This project, famous in the history of the book, was the brainchild of Diderot and D’Alembert, two luminaries who believed that a comprehensive account of all branches of human knowledge was needed. They financed the project themselves, through subscriptions, made expert use of illustrations, and created a monument in the history of the book. In their comprehensiveness, Diderot and D’Alembert were the heirs to Poliziano’s multidisciplinary drive. In their views of religion, they were the distant progeny of Valla. And in their antiinstitutional nature, they reflect Italian Renaissance humanism, a cultural movement whose protagonists often took care to situate themselves outside of existing institutions. After the treatment of the Encyclopédie, Thomas Jefferson makes a cameo appearance. In his “Jefferson Bible,” he literally cut and pasted parts of the New Testament that he believed showed Jesus’s true nature – not, in Jefferson’s view, as a divine personage (Jefferson discarded all the stories of miracles), but rather as an ethical exemplar. Doing so, Jefferson reflected one very important tendency in history of philology, one that Valla had begun, the Protestant Reformation spread, and the French Enlightenment completed: the desacralizing of the Bible

This chapter examines the fifteenth-century thinker Lorenzo Valla (1406–57), whose work serves both as an emblem of a certain style of reading in the fifteenth century and as a connector to today’s debates on the humanities. Through his meticulous reading and scholarship, Valla accomplished a number of things. He uncovered a historic forgery claiming that the Church was owed substantial property by secular rulers, doing so with both emotional appeals to common sense and technical criticism of the language of the forgery. He wrote the most successful presentation of the Latin language’s grammar and syntax in the Renaissance – an exceedingly important accomplishment, since Latin was the language of international scholarship. He opened the floodgates to the later, 16th-century Reformation by suggesting that the Latin Vulgate Bible’s language could be changed to reflect the meaning of the original Greek in which the New Testament was written. This move was momentous, since by Valla’s day 1,000 years of Christian theology had been practiced with the Latin Vulgate as its basis. The chapter also argues that to understand him – and by extension the humanities at large – emotions need to be brought into the picture.

This chapter moves to the French Enlightenment, arguing that echoes of Renaissance humanism emerge in the Encyclopédie. This project, famous in the history of the book, was the brainchild of Diderot and D’Alembert, two luminaries who believed that a comprehensive account of all branches of human knowledge was needed. They financed the project themselves, through subscriptions, made expert use of illustrations, and created a monument in the history of the book. In their comprehensiveness, Diderot and D’Alembert were the heirs to Poliziano’s multidisciplinary drive. In their views of religion, they were the distant progeny of Valla. And in their antiinstitutional nature, they reflect Italian Renaissance humanism, a cultural movement whose protagonists often took care to situate themselves outside of existing institutions. After the treatment of the Encyclopédie, Thomas Jefferson makes a cameo appearance. In his “Jefferson Bible,” he literally cut and pasted parts of the New Testament that he believed showed Jesus’s true nature – not, in Jefferson’s view, as a divine personage (Jefferson discarded all the stories of miracles), but rather as an ethical exemplar. Doing so, Jefferson reflected one very important tendency in history of philology, one that Valla had begun, the Protestant Reformation spread, and the French Enlightenment completed: the desacralizing of the Bible

Chapter 4 shows that tensions about the applicability of knowledge were never more pronounced than when it came to geographical information. The Gazeta newspaper used its networks of knowledge to attempt to create a new ‘Description of Guatemala’ that would not just counter erroneous claims about the Americas peddled by some European philosophers, but also critically examined existing sources and formats of geographical knowledge. They rejected geography as a universal science that related places across the globe to each other, and instead prioritised information from current statistics as well as local historical archives. Individual reformers also contributed even more practical geographies that reported their own experience of travel. Geography and chorography was considered useful only in so far as it would help to increase trade and prosperity. It followed that securing transport connections through road and harbour works that would allow for an exploitation of natural wealth was the most important application of such knowledge. Reformers attempted to rewrite the geography of the Audiencia’s trade routes, and thought of their projects as integrating specific places more firmly into the geography of the region.