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Full Description
Joan-Pau Rubiés brings together here eleven studies published between 1991 and 2005 that illuminate the impact of travel writing on the transformation of early modern European culture. The new worlds that European navigation opened up at the turn of the 16th century elicited a great deal of curiosity and were the subject of a vast range of writings, much of them with an empirical basis, albeit often subtly fictionalized. In the context of intense literary and intellectual activity that characterized the Renaissance, the encounters generated by European colonial activities in fact produced a remarkable variety of images of human diversity. Some of these images were conditioned by the actual dynamics of cross-cultural encounters overseas, but many others were elaborated in Europe by cosmographers, historians and philosophers pursuing their own moral and political agendas. As the studies included here show, the combined effect was in the long term dramatic: interacting with the impact of humanism and of insurmountable religious divisions, travel writing decisively contributed to the transformation of European culture towards the concerns of the Enlightenment. The essays illuminate this process through a combination of general discussions and the contextual analysis of particular texts and debates, ranging form the earliest ethnographies produced by merchants travelling to Asia with Vasco da Gama, to the writings of Jesuit missionaries researching idolatry in India and China, or thinkers like Hugo Grotius seeking to explain the origin of the American Indians.
Contents
Contents: Introduction; Part I Historical Perspectives: Travel writing as a genre: facts, fictions and the invention of a scientific discourse in early modern Europe; New worlds and renaissance ethnology; Instructions for travellers: teaching the eye to see; Travel writing and ethnography. Part II Texts and Debates: Giovanni di Buonagrazia's letter to his father concerning his participation in the 2nd expedition of Vasco da Gama (1502-1503); The oriental voices of Mendes Pinto, or the traveller as ethnologist in Portuguese India; Futility in the New World: narratives of travel in 16th-century America; The Jesuit discovery of Hinduism: Antonio Rubino's account of the history and religion of Vijayanagara (1608); The concept of cultural dialogue and the Jesuit method of accommodation: between idolatry and civilisation; The Spanish contribution to the ethnology of Asia in the 16th and 17th centuries; Hugo Grotius's dissertation on the origin of the American peoples and the use of comparative methods; Addenda and corrigenda; Index.
