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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.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Introduction: Renaissance maps and the concept of the human; 1. Climate, culture or kinship? Explaining human diversity c.1500; 2. Atlantic empires, map workshops and Renaissance geographical culture; 3. Spit-roasts, barbecues and the invention of the Brazilian cannibal; 4. Trade, empires and propaganda: Brazilians on French maps in the age of François I and Henri II; 5. Monstrous ontology and environmental thinking: Patagonia's giants; 6. The epistemology of wonder: Amazons, headless men and mapping Guiana; 7. Civility, idolatry and cities in Mexico and Peru; 8. New sources, new genres and America's place in the world, 1590-1645; Epilogue; Bibliography; Index.
Über den Autor / die Autorin
Surekha Davies is a cultural historian and historian of science at Western Connecticut State University. Her interests include exploration, observational sciences, cultural encounters, monstrosity and the history of mentalities c.1400–1800. Formerly a British Library Curator and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, she is a Founding Editor of the series 'Maps, Spaces, Cultures' (Brill). She has held fellowships at the John Carter Brown Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Library of Congress and the Newberry Library, and been funded by the American Historical Association and the American Philosophical Society. Her publications include articles in The Historical Journal, History and Anthropology, Renaissance Studies and The Journal of Early Modern History.
Zusammenfassung
Surekha Davies examines how Renaissance illustrated maps shaped ideas about peoples of the Americas, revealing how mapmakers devised detailed images and descriptions that placed peoples within a hierarchy of civility and savagery. Davies shows how ideas about monstrosity were crucial for early modern ethnology and, consequently, for colonial expansion.
Bericht
'Surekha Davies brings an astounding arsenal of historiographic tools to her interpretation of the ethnographic images on maps and draws on a vast visual and textual archive to provide a compelling account of their evolution, meaning and spread. It is hard to imagine that anyone else would be better placed to interpret this material.' Rebecca Earle, University of Warwick
