Mapping the Renaissance World: The Geographical Imagination in the Age of Discovery

At the turn of the sixteenth century, princes and navigators presided over a geographical revolution that fundamentally altered the way people viewed the world. Geography underwent a change in scale, and perceptions shifted from the Mediterranean - hitherto privileged as a universal centre surrounded by an unknown periphery - to the Oceanic.

This book focuses on the work of the great sixteenth-century traveller and map-maker, André Thevet. Accused of blasphemous audacity and mocked for his encyclopaedic aims, the figure of Thevet is a wonderful example of the way that knowledge of the world was transformed during the decline of the Renaissance.

A civilization can be evaluated by its maps; they show its perception of the Other and the image which it forms of itself. Describing Thevet's travels to Brazil, Lestringant maps a world of Amazons, cannibals and savage kings. As an inventory of the unknown, such a map highlights the ignorance of an age when the treasures of humanism were being taken up by its inheritors. He describes how, during their attempts to colonize America, the French colonialists' experience of peaceful relations with the Tupinamba Indians gave rise to the myth of the Noble Savage. He examines the way that the image of the naked cannibal Indian could be grasped and even accepted by Europeans at a time of religious and social crisis.

Exploring the interrelations between representation and power in the age of discovery, Mapping the Renaissance World will be of interest to students and researchers in early modern history, literature and anthropology.