This book deals with the De Bry collection of voyages, one of the most monumental publications of Early Modern Europe. It analyzes the textual and iconographic changes the De Bry publishing family made to travel accounts describing Asia, Africa and the New World. It discusses this editorial strategy in the context of the publishing industry around 1600, investigating the biography of the De Brys, the publications of the Frankfurt firm, and the making of the collection, as well as its reception by Iberian inquisitors and seventeenth-century readers across the Old World. The book draws on a wide variety of primary sources, and is hence important for historians, book historians, and art historians interested in the development of Europe's overseas empires.

In Imagining the Americas in Print, Michiel van Groesen reveals the variety of ways in which publishers and printers in early modern Europe gathered information about the Americas, constructed a narrative, and used it to further colonial ambitions in the Atlantic world (1500–1700). The essays examine the creative ways in which knowledge was manufactured in printing workshops. Collectively they bring to life the vivid print culture that determined the relationship between the Old World and the New in the Age of Encounters, and chart the genres that reflected and shaped the European imagination, and helped to legitimate ideologies of colonialism in the next two centuries.

When the New World was really new, Theodore de Bry drew inspiration from some of history's greatest explorers to record its wonders. From Virginia and Florida to Brazil, his work captivated the European imagination with visions of freshly discovered landscapes, customs, and peoples. This reproduction brings together his finest engravings of...

Visions of Savage Paradise is the first major book-length study of seventeenth-century Dutch artist Albert Eckhout to be published in nearly seventy years. Eckhout, who was court painter to the colonial governor of Dutch Brazil, created life-size paintings of Amerindians, Africans, and Brazilians of mixed race in support of the governor’s project to document the people and natural history of the colony. In this study, Rebecca Parker Brienen provides a detailed analysis of Eckhout’s works, framing them with discussions of both their colonial context and contemporary artistic practices in the Dutch republic.

This volume examines how and why many early modern pictures operate in an ekphrastic mode.

Bringing together original contributions from scholars across the world, this volume traces the history of travel writing from antiquity to the Internet age. It examines travel texts of several national or linguistic traditions, introducing readers to the global contexts of the genre. From wilderness to the urban, from Nigeria to the polar regions, from mountains to rivers and the desert, this book explores some of the key places and physical features represented in travel writing. Chapters also consider the employment in travel writing of the diary, the letter, visual images, maps and poetry, as well as the relationship of travel writing to fiction, science, translation and tourism. Gender-based and ecocritical approaches are among those surveyed. Together, the thirty-seven chapters here underline the richness and complexity of this genre.

A timely examination of the ways in which sixteenth-century understandings of the world were framed by classical theory.