Philology and Natural Sciences
Archival World of a Missionary Traveller Paulinus à S. Bartholomaeo (18th-19th c.)
Ines G. Zupanov
Contemporary with the British Orientalists in Calcutta, Paulinus was a Sanskrit scholar and a missionary polymath, who travelled through South India and upon his return to Europe, on the eve of the French Revolution, wrote and published numerous works on Indian philology, history, ethnography, botany, zoology, and so on.
His manuscripts and printed texts received only a scant scholarly attention. In my presentation I will look into his Viaggio alle Indie Orientali published in Rome in 1796, in which he collected an enormous amount of information about Indian plants, remedies and medical techniques. This unsystematic documentation was, in fact, a summa of the Catholic Orientalist missionary research into Indian materialia and spiritualia.
Bibliography (primary and secondary sources)
Desmond, Ray, Great Natural History Books and their Creators, London: The British Library and Oak Knoll Press, 2003.
jensen_tranquebar_doctors.pdf — Jensen, Niklas Thode, “Texts and Documents, The Medical Skills of the Malabar Doctors in Tranquebar, India, as Recorded by Surgeon T L F Folly, 1798”, Medical History, 2005, 49, pp. 489–515.
Perron, Anquetil du, Voyage aux Indes orientales par le P. Paulin de S. Bathélemy, Missionnaire; traduit de l'Italien par M***[Marchesan], Avec les observations de MM Anquetil du Perron, J. R. Forster et Silvestre de Sacy; Et une dissertation de M. Anquetil sur la propriété individuelle et foncière dans l'Inde et en Égypte. Tome troisième. A Paris, Chez Tourneisen fils, Libraire, Rue de Seine, No. 12, 1808.
Paulinus a S. Bartholomaeo, Viaggio alle Indie Orientali, umiliato alla Santita di N.S Papa Pio Sesto Pontefice Massimo, da Fra Paolino da S. Bartolomeo, Carmelito scalzo, Roma 1796.
pearson_medical_relativities.pdf — Pearson, M. N., “The Thin Edge of the Wedge; Medical Relativities as a Paradigm of Early Modern Indian—European Relations”, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 29, No. 1, Feb. 1995, pp. 141-170.
raj_surgeons_fakirs.pdf — Raj, Kapil, “Surgeons, Fakirs, Merchants, and Craftsmen: Making L’Empereur’s Jardin in Early Modern South Asia”, in Relocating Modern Science; Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650-1900, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Reede tot Drakestein, H.A. van. Hortus Indicus Malabaricus, Amsterdam, 1678-1693. 12 vols.
Salmon, Paul B., “The Beginning of Morphology; Linguistic Botanizing in the 18th Century”, Historiographica Linguistica, 1974, 1:3, pp. 313-339
Schwab, Raymond , La renaissance orientale, Paris : Payot, 1950 (English edition with E. Said’s introduction].
Vicenzo Maria di Santa Caterina da Siena (alias Vincenzo Maria Murchio), Il viaggio all'Indie Orientali del padre F. Vincenzo Maria di S. Caterina da Siena Procurator Gener. de’ Carm. Scalzi, con le osseruationi, e successi nel medesimo, i costumi, e riti di varie nationi, et reconditissimi arcani de' gentili, cauati con somma diligenza da' loro scritti, con la descrittione degli Animali Quadrupedi, Serpenti, Uccelli, Piante di quel Mondo Nuovo, con le loro virtu singolary, Diuiso in cinque libri. Opera non meno Utile, che curiosa, in Venetia : appresso Giacomo Zattoni, 1678.
zupanov_paulinus.pdf — Županov, Ines G., “Amateur Naturalist and ‘Professional’ Orientalist; Paulinus a S. Bartholomaeo in Kerala and Rome (18th-19th c.)”, Revista de Cultura / Review of Culture, thematic issue on “European Travellers and the Asian Natural World – I” edited by Rui Manuel Loureiro, No. 20, 2006, pp. 77-101.
zupanov_bibliography_Paulinus.doc
Ines G. Zupanov
Research fellow in history, CNRS
CEIAS-EHESS
54, boulevard Raspail
F-75006 Paris
A number of her publications can be downloaded
from Ines Zupanov's recently updated personal website:
http://www.ineszupanov.com/index.htm
Due to its being particularly relevant to our meeting, the following one has been added to our library:
zupanov_drugs.pdf — “Drugs, health, bodies and souls in the tropics: Medical experiments in sixteenth-century Portuguese India”, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 39, 1 (2002).