The Alchemy of Conquest is an ambitious, expansive attempt to transform some concepts that have long been critical to our understanding of the encounter between Europe and the Americas. Chief among these is “discovery,” which is still sometimes presented as an organizing framework for the sixteenth century and which, even for those who wish to challenge it, can be difficult to critique effectively. As Bauer argues, the modern paradigm of discovery was not brought about by “the ‘event’ of discovery itself” as traditional narratives would have us believe (11). Rejecting this story of “epistemic ‘shock,’” Bauer demonstrates persuasively that this could not have happened because “discovery,” at the time, was not understood in ways that would have made such an application possible. Discovery then was not so much about finding something new as it was about finding something secret: things hidden, but nevertheless known to someone. Further, only through centuries of change did the “vain curiosity” about things hidden transform into a “just curiosity” (in Augustinian terms) into things hidden. (19) This transformation both justified the terms of conquest and validated a modern paradigm of discovery, giving rise to scientific empiricism.

The language of alchemy, Bauer argues, is what made this transformation possible. And in Bauer's hands, alchemy itself is transformed, beginning—for all but specialists, I would wager—as something obscure, verging almost on the quaintly fantastical, and becoming by the end both a powerful metaphor and, for the period in question, an epistemic juggernaut. Alchemical thinking, in one form or another, informs the intellectual trajectory or worldview of almost every author Bauer discusses, from Christopher Columbus to José de Acosta to Walter Raleigh, and beyond its efforts to reshape our understanding of discovery, this book should also rehabilitate alchemy as a necessary element of late medieval and early modern thought. In a manner neatly fitting with his subject, Bauer demonstrates that understanding the importance of alchemy can unlock otherwise inscrutable claims from this historical period.

A most valuable contribution is, in this vein, to unlock, in this vein, new conceptions of conquest and conversion with the alchemical key. In a discussion over several chapters offering fresh analyses of Francisco de Vitoria, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Bartolomé de las Casas, and Bernardino de Sahagún, among others, Bauer reconsiders old questions about Indian nature, just war, and conversion through reducción, the “reduction” of both language and bodies. Bauer argues that Franciscans, tasked with some of the early work of conversion by the Spanish crown, had an alchemical understanding of Native spirituality: that is, they “saw Native spirituality not as an undifferentiated matter that had to be formed” but as “its own substantial form that had to be reduced to its prima material in order to be re-formed” (223). This sheds a different light on the Franciscan missionary zeal that resulted in an artificial (rather than natural) “operation that potentially entailed the application of significant amounts of epistemic violence and coercion” (226).

In a later chapter, the famous debate between Sepúlveda and Las Casas is similarly reimagined. Emphasizing how Sepúlveda described Americans as “humunculos” in a 1545 book, Bauer traces this term to alchemical thinking: “In late medieval and the early modern Aristotelianism, a homunculus . . . was known as an artificial human created in the alchemical flask” (332). This, Bauer demonstrates, is what Sepúlveda had in mind as he argued that just war could be waged on such beings in the New World.

In a final section of the book, Bauer persuasively joins the ambitions and justifications of Spanish conquest to the English projects of settlement, exploration, and yes, “discovery.” Francis Bacon's ideas for scientific reform and his elaboration of a paradigm of discovery, Bauer argues, were modeled on Spanish imperial knowledge production. Bauer's restless, determined exploration in this volume effects its own form of alchemy, transforming ideas that had seemed lusterless—discovery, conquest, conversion—into surprising and compelling categories of thought.