The legitimation of discovery shifted from papal to monarchical-national authority

Evidence

The transformation of discovery from a religious doctrine brought together hugely significant forces in the making of the modern Occident. Intriguing similarities with religious forms and justifications remained, but the search for a legitimating basis of discovery shifted from the papal and universal to the monarchical and national. A pointed significance attached to the technique of enquiry adopted by the Church for its government and taken over, as it were, by monarchical government through law: such enquiry extended to “a technique of traveling - a political enterprise of exercising power and an enterprise of curiosity and acquisition of knowledge - that ultimately led to the discovery of the Americas” (Foucault, 1996:340). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 220

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the exploration-bureaucracy theme (notaries recording discovery) and to how state formation displaces religious authority — parallels the Royal Societies’ knowledge-acquisition projects in early colonial science.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how precisely did the legal-notary ritual of ‘acts of possession’ become the template for later claim-staking in settler colonies, and does it persist in modern land law?