Book ID: CBB173945462

Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic (2017)

unapi

Mancall, Peter C. (Author)


University of Pennsylvania Press


Publication Date: 2017
Physical Details: 212 pages
Language: English

In the sixteenth-century Atlantic world, nature and culture swirled in people's minds to produce fantastic images. 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 Yucatan created openings to buildings that resembled a fierce animal's jaws, known to archaeologists as serpent-column portals.In Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic, historian Peter C. 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. Through innovative use of oral history and folklore maintained for centuries by Native Americans, as well as original use of spectacular manuscript atlases, paintings that depict on-the-spot European representations of nature, and texts that circulated imperfectly across the ocean, he reveals how the encounter between the old world and the new changed the fate of millions of individuals.This inspired work of Atlantic, European, and American history begins with medieval concepts of nature and ends in an age when the printed book became the primary avenue for the dissemination of scientific information. Throughout the sixteenth century, the borders between the natural world and the supernatural were more porous than modern readers might realize. Native Americans and Europeans alike thought about monsters, spirits, and insects in considerable depth. In Mancall's vivid narrative, the modern world emerged as a result of the myriad encounters between peoples who inhabited the Atlantic basin in this period. The centuries that followed can be comprehended only by exploring how culture in its many forms—stories, paintings, books—shaped human understanding of the natural world.

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Reviewed By

Review Shepard Krech Iii (2019) Review of "Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic". Journal of Southern History (pp. 412-413). unapi

Review Molly A Warsh (July 2019) Review of "Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic". Environmental History (pp. 618-620). unapi

Review Alix Cooper (2018) Review of "Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic". Journal of Early Modern History (pp. 554-556). unapi

Review Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger (2018) Review of "Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic". Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 839-840). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB173945462/

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Authors & Contributors
Leitão, Henrique
Overhoff, Jürgen
Shick, John Malcolm
Silke Förschler
Wimmler, Jutta
Pastore, Christopher L.
Concepts
Natural history
Nature and its relationship to culture; human-nature relationships
Science and culture
Collectors and collecting
Specimens
Scientific illustration
Time Periods
18th century
Early modern
17th century
19th century
16th century
Renaissance
Places
Atlantic world
Atlantic Ocean
Europe
Americas
Africa
France
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