Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic (The Early Modern Americas)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.46 (548 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0812249666 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 212 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2017-05-27 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
"Brilliantly illustrated and written with flashes of wit and humor, Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic traces the shift in people's thinking about nature from the medieval to the modern period. Mancall brings his encyclopedic knowledge of the primary and secondary sources to bear on monsters, insects, tropical forests, and indigenous peoples and shows that a new fascination with the material spectacle of the New World contributed to secular explanations of natural phenomena."—Donald Worster, author of Shrinking the Earth: The Rise and Decline of American Abundance. Peter C
He is author of numerous books, including Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson--A Tale of Mutiny and Murder in the Arctic and Hakluyt's Promise: An Elizabethan's Obsession for an English America. Peter C. Mancall is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, the Linda and Harlan Martens Director of the Early Modern Studies Institute, and Professor of History and Anthropology at the University
The centuries that followed can only be comprehended by exploring how culture in its many forms—stories, paintings, books—shaped human understanding of the natural world.. In the sixteenth-century Atlantic world, nature and culture swirled in people's minds to produce fantastic images. Mancall reveals how Europeans and Native Americans thought about a natural world undergoing rapid change in the century following the historic voyages of Christopher Columbus. In Mancall's vivid narrative, the modern world emerged as a result of the myriad encounters between peoples who inhabited the Atlantic basin in the sixteenth century. Throughout this period, the borders between the natural world and the supernatural were more porous than modern readers might realize. In the South of France, a cloister's painted wooden panels greeted parishioners with vivid depictions of unicorns, dragons, and centaurs, while Mayans in the Yu