Giants, cannibals and other monsters were a regular feature of Renaissance illustrated maps, inhabiting the Americas alongside other indigenous peoples. In a new approach to views of distant peoples, ...Surekha Davies analyzes this archive alongside prints, costume books and geographical writing. Using sources from Iberia, France, the German lands, the Low Countries, Italy and England, Davies argues that mapmakers and viewers saw these maps as careful syntheses that enabled viewers to compare different peoples. In an age when scholars, missionaries, native peoples and colonial officials debated whether New World inhabitants could – or should – be converted or enslaved, maps were uniquely suited for assessing the impact of environment on bodies and temperaments. Through innovative interdisciplinary methods connecting the European Renaissance to the Atlantic world, Davies uses new sources and questions to explore science as a visual pursuit, revealing how debates about the relationship between humans and monstrous peoples challenged colonial expansion.
This article explores the impulse behind the outpouring of extraordinarily ornate maps representing the inhabitants of Brazil that emanated from Normandy in the mid-sixteenth century. It aims to ...understand the reasons behind the iconography of Brazil, a region of particular commercial interest for the French. Whereas maps produced elsewhere in this period emphasize the presence of fierce cannibals in Brazil, Norman examples highlight peaceful relations, particularly the dyewood trade. By analysing the maps in comparison with extant maps from other centres of production (particularly Portugal and the German lands), travel accounts, and wider visual culture, this article explores their relationship to possible sources and considers the extent to which their iconography had a basis in experience. By investigating the use of these maps as gifts to French kings, it suggests that the mapmakers’ selective use of trading imagery also played a persuasive role in the Norman maritime world's disputes with the Portuguese crown over the extent of Portugal's Atlantic empire.
Abstract
The articles in this volume offer interventions in the history of encounters between new worlds and the intellectual traditions inherited from and informed by classical antiquity, in the ...period roughly spanning 1450-1850. Ranging in scope from medical treatments to devil-worship, from cosmography to climate theory, from rhetorical colloquies to the interpretation of widow-burning, they show how early modern scholars, artisans, and travelers drew on multiple cultural traditions within Europe, as well as on indigenous knowledge networks in Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, in their attempts to incorporate new information into their existing world-view.
During the Renaissance, readers of accounts about the Far East faced the problem of assessing sources from a range of periods, often produced by writers who were not eyewitnesses. This article ...considers the responses of mapmakers and geographers to claims about the East by analysing expressions of belief, surprise, doubt and incredulity on maps and in geographical works. By considering examples from the late medieval period to the seventeenth century, it reveals important continuities to the ways in which the East, and Marco Polo, were perceived before and after sustained European contact with the Far East began. Particular attention is paid to Fra Mauro, maker of the most extensively annotated map before the age of oceanic travel to Asia; and to Giovanni Battista Ramusio, editor of the first multi-volume travel compendium.
Sebastian Münster's Cosmographiae universalis libri VI (1550) was produced in more sixteenth-century editions that any book apart from the Bible. A descriptive geography prefaced by a series of maps, ...it offered the reader an overview of the world's peoples, natural history and geography. While German cosmographers had been instrumental in the emergence of the notion of America as the fourth part of the world, Münster considered America as part of Asia in a world with three, rather than four, parts. This article investigates how Münster conceptualized America and Amerindians in the Cosmographia, and the ways in which he related them to the rest of the world. It shows how Münster's consideration of America as part of an island chain that included the Spice Islands or Moluccas fed into a broader discourse of long-distance trade and exploration rather than indicating the limits of his ability to reconcile classical geography with contemporary exploration. It explains why Münster's delineation of America as an island was unsuccessful, but also why it consituted a reasonable model in the sixteenth century.
