Early Modern Constructions of A Global South

The Secrets of Nature and Early Modern
Constructions of a Global South

sandra young
abstract
Early modernitys attempts at explaining human diversity are legible within the pages of the great
compilations of travel narratives that claimed to uncover the secrets of nature and present them,
on the page, with due scholarly seriousness. This article analyzes compilations accounts of the
novelties of abundant new worlds and considers the mechanisms with which early modern
compilations of travel narratives and natural histories set up equivalences between regions across
the global south. These subtle equivalences had bearings on the positioning of far-away new
worlds in relation to an expansionist Europe. Composite volumes like Sebastian Mnsters influential cosmography of 1544, Cosmographiae Universalis, established equivalences between disparate regions through their ordering principles and structural devices like woodcut images,
transposed and reused to indicate very different regions in the world. These equivalences gathered
strength in the English-language versions of Mnsters volume, repackaged for an English readership by Richard Eden and Thomas Marshe. This article examines these smaller English editions,
along with Edens translation of Peter Martyrs Decades of the Newe World (1555), to understand how early modern English print culture helped to construct a global south, positioning the
unfamiliar and far-off peoples of the torrid zones in deprecatory conceptual categories.
All which things may give further occasions to Philosophers to search the
secrets of nature, and complexions of men, with the novelties of the newe
worlde. (Peter Martyr, Decades of the Newe World)
For sixteenth-century natural historian Peter Martyr, human difference is a

phenomenon to be marveled at and investigated further. Like the alluring secrets of nature, human difference can be found in the newe worlde and its
the journal for early modern cultural studies
vol. 15, no. 3 (summer 2015) 2015
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novelties, which are waiting to be uncovered and explained through the

knowledge practices of Philosophers. 1 His reflection on New World difference contributes to the enduring association among three elements of learning
in early modern culture: human difference (signaled, above, in his allusion to
the complexions of men), natural history (the secrets of nature) [311r], and the
changing cosmographies, or conceptual systems, that might shed light on it all.
The texts that emerge from this period tell a complex story of the need for
new conceptual systems with which to represent geographical discoveries
and reflect on their significance for European self-understanding and global
positioning. The development of a discourse with which to consider the southern climes, or simply the south, is strikingly evident not only in the texts
dependence on the imprecise language of cardinal directions (in terms like
south and southern) but also in the visual language of early modern
book-making, as I aim to show. In sixteenth-century textual representations of
new worlds, we see the development of mechanisms with which to represent
human subjects from far-off lands, mechanisms that turned them into objects
of curiosity, on the page. Equivalences were set up between regions of the
world, many of them long known to European explorers, in terms, I will argue,
that established an implicit divide between the north and the south, attributing alterity to the southern parts of the world. The central concern of this
essay emerges from the observation of the emergence of a global south on the
pages of the compilations that set out the new geography in early modernity.
The periods self-consciously scholarly texts helped to authorize in print
the first imaginings of new worlds, and decades of careful scholarship have
alerted us to some of the ways in which these texts established insidious ideas
about European superiority. This article contributes to that body of work by
considering the representational practices with which perceived colonial difference was inscribed within the texts through the language of an emergent
geography and formalized as knowledge. In particular, I will argue that the
language of cardinal points offered early modern intellectuals a conceptual
grid with which to signal perceptions of human difference that came into
viewindeed, came into beingas a result of European exploration. In examining the structural hermeneutics at work in the volumes that described the
newly expanded world, we can observe at work some of the assumptions underpinning inscriptions of alterity in this period.
Scholars do not agree about the most appropriate language to use in trying
to fathom the ways in which human difference is invoked, or if it is even appro-
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Youngt The Secrets of Nature
priate to do so at all. In an essay that provocatively asks the question Does the
Other Exist? Alain Badiou casts aspersions on the intellectual preoccupation
with difference. He identifies in the culturalism that informs contemporary
ethics, a tourists fascination for the diversity of morals, customs and beliefs
that is directly inherited from the astonishment of the colonial encounter
with savages (26). The whole ethical predication based upon recognition of
the other should be purely and simply abandoned in favor of recognizing the
Same (25). Badious suspicion of scholarly fascination with perceived cultural
difference and his impatience with the empty piety of human rights discourse
and its anti-intellectualism are no doubt warranted. Yet, his characterization
of the early modern encounter and its lasting impact on our thinking calls for
further probing. The early modern encounter with human difference was not a
single event or even a series of events, alike in their effects. Furthermore, Badious
challenge makes it necessary to distinguish clearly between critical scrutiny of
the emergence of cultural difference and what he calls the preoccupation
with recognition of the other (27) by the scholar whose good intentions do
little to address the pejorative assumptions that undergird inimical binarisms.
The representation of human difference in early modernity goes beyond
the discursive binaries (self and other) that postcolonial scholars have done
so much to bring under critical scrutiny.2 The terminology of postcolonialism
has been useful to scholars concerned to trace imperialist relations of power
and their effects in the formation of categories of thought and practice in early
modernity. Certainly, early modernity provides a rich period case study for an
analysis of how power relations play themselves out in the knowledge practices
and cultural expressions of an increasingly secular world, as early modern
scholars have shown. For example, Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin have
drawn our attention to the shared intellectual history (11) common to postcolonial theory and revisionist early modern scholarship (11), and have rightly
called for more politically invested (11) engagement with the period. Dependence on terminology that can only ever be applied retrospectively through the
ravages of nineteenth-century colonialism makes it hard to attend to the particular hermeneutical mechanisms at work in the volumes themselves as representational battlegrounds, however. More recently, new vocabularies have
made themselves available with which to understand the impact of early modern texts in representing the connected histories of peoples across the globe
and thereby helping to shape global relations of power. Daniel Vitkus has
drawn on the trope of conversion to argue that the early modern Mediterra-
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nean world was much more complex and interconnected than postcolonialisms language of positionality can accommodate. His influential study,
Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 15701630,
takes issue with the tendency of early modern scholars to read representations of the Other according to a teleological historiography of Western domination, conquest and colonization (5), a historiography that cannot account
for, or even recognize, the more complex web of engagement between England
and the increasingly imperialist Ottoman Turks in the Mediterranean world.3
This marks a departure from an earlier swathe of scholarship that tended to
view the encounters that resulted from European travel in the early modern
period as a collision between incommensurable worlds and peoples. At least,
this is the way Daniel Carey characterizes an influential body of scholarly work
in the 1980s and 1990s that produced what he calls the consensus view in studies of early modern travel (33)that the encounter between cultures made
visible an incommensurability that tends to be conceptualized [by scholars]
as absolute (33). On the contrary, Carey argues, the texts that advised English
travelers in managing the difficulties associated with travel, the ars apodemica
of Careys study, paint a rather different picture: the perspective that emerges
in these writings suggests the potential interchangeability of self and other
rather than the radical opposition between the two that ostensibly structured
the occasion (34). In fact, Carey would argue, it is precisely the awareness of
possible correspondences and the fear of English susceptibility to the influence
of foreign cultures and practices that set off an anxiety surrounding cultural
contact and assertions of a difference that, if we read the texts more carefully,
was not so absolute.4
Carey implies that twentieth-century interpreters of early modern exploration narratives were too easily taken in by their assertions, and have not attended to the texts more reflexive and contradictory moments, which tell a
different story. Early modern [r]epresentatives of the metropolitan culture
may have attempted to assert incommensurability and to enforce cultural distinctness through legal and other measures, but they did so in the face of evidence to the contrary (Carey 33). By reading more widely and more skeptically,
Carey alerts us to evidence that contradicts the dominant narrative. Even
counter examples, however, do not take us beyond a dichotomous framework.
Without trying to understand the terms and representational strategies that
appeared in print, through which the early moderns made sense of their increasingly complicated world, we risk remaining locked into adjudicating be-
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tween commensurability and incommensurability, or limited to categorizing

degrees of perceived alterity in terms of our own construction.
For Myra Jehlen, it is not necessary to look for evidence of mutuality in
early modern texts to counter the idea of incommensurability; it is precisely
the charge of inhumanity in early modern descriptions of indigenous Americansthe bloodthirsty Caribsthat paradoxically reveals the Europeans
recognition of the Americans humanity: Were inhumanity a fact it would preclude a self-justifying condemnation (152).5 For Jehlen, the scholarly commitment to softening the perceived otherness of the indigenous Americans is
misplaced; it may even constitute a new form of effacement (171). There is no
need to rescue the indigenous Americans from their characterization as
Other by moderating their radical otherness and transform[ing] it into relative difference (159), for example by disavowing the possibility that alterity as
radical as cannibalism existed historically.6 The ostensibly laudable interpretative endeavor of certain modes of postcolonial scholarship might, paradoxically, make it impossible to see resistance and might bolster, instead, the clout
of the modern day scholar: the recuperation of the self-definitionor, more
broadly, the agencyof the conquered has been the central principle of the
postcolonial scholarship that precisely thereby enlists itself in decolonization
(171). Jehlen proposes a method of reading that uncovers the agency of the colonized even though the texts... are virtually always and only the colonizers
narratives (171). In doing so, she invites us to revise our well-intentioned aversion to the possibility of alterity.
I find this salutary. Even so, there is more to be understood about the field
of difference into which the early moderns consigned the peoples they encountered across the seas, and themselves. To this end I extend my critical reading
into what book historian Roger Chartier calls the reading spaces beyond the
traditional domain of literary studies.7 My concern, here and elsewhere, has
been to read the books themselves and not just the sentences they contain
their structural mechanisms, the histories of their component parts, the intellectual paradigms established in their terminology, their images, their indices
and tablesin order to examine the explanatory frameworks early modern
savants constructed for making sense of perceived differences across the globe.
In this essay I argue that the language of cartography made itself available as a
conceptual grid within which to place the peoples of the world, without having
to resolve degrees of difference. The lexicon of manners and customsthat
is to say, human geographyprovided a seemingly measured language and a
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10
code for presenting diverse practices that could nonetheless be placed or understood in relation to the unexplained norm of the European observer whose
way of life did not require explanation, and the language of cartography provided a seemingly dependable system with which to differentiate across geopolitical spaces.
In the discussion that follows, I argue that the early chronicles of European
exploration, such as Peter Martyrs Decades of the Newe World (1555) and Richard
Edens English adaptation of Sebastian Mnsters Cosmographiae Universalis,
Edens Treatyse of the Newe World (1553), construct a global social hierarchy
through the lexicon of an emergent geography and, explicitly, the language of
the global south.8 The texts subtly establish equivalences between regions in
the global south, equivalences that gathered plausibility with each new iteration, positioning the peoples of the worlds torrid zones in deprecatory conceptual categories.
Establishing equivalences across the global south:
Sebastian Mnsters Cosmographiae Universalis
A startling example of this mode of global signification is seen in Sebastian
Mnsters compendium of all the regions of the world. The German cartographers Cosmographiae Universalis reveals the contribution made by early modern geography to establishing a discourse of geopolitical order. The work first
appeared in German in 1544, a bulky encyclopaedic text of over 640 folio pages.
It was the first attempt to represent the whole world following Europes discovery of America. Though caught up with the new discoveries, it followed
the form of Ptolemys Geography, which Mnster had published in 1540 after
years of scholarly research into German geography. The Cosmographiae arranged its material into sections covering the four parts of the world and thus
signaled through its textual structure a sense of epistemological familiarity,
scholarly reliability, and due order in the face of proliferating travel accounts.
The Cosmographiae has been credited with helping to shape the practices of
sixteenth-century geography; its many editions in the first hundred years of its
existence attest to its influence.9
Although many translations appeared soon after publication of the first
edition,10 no English version of Mnsters Cosmographiae was ever published, at
least not in its entirety; abridged versions in English appeared within the first
couple of decades. These were collections of extracts deemed pertinent for an
English readership and reframed accordingly. Excerpts were translated into
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11
Fig. 1: Frontispiece of Sebastian Mnsters Cosmographiae Universalis. Source:

ETH-Bibliothek Zrich, Alte und Seltene Drucke.
English by Richard Eden and compiled into a new volume, Treatyse of the Newe
India (1553), within a frame that emphasized the Americas. A few years later
Thomas Marshe selected accounts that would present the titillation of the
new to avid armchair explorers. Marshes slight quarto volume, A briefe collection and compendious extract of the strau[n]ge and memorable things, gathered oute
of the cosmographye of Sebastian Munster (1572), flaunts the marvelous in what is
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12
new, as I discuss at greater length below. Marshes version of Mnster is not

concerned to differentiate between distinct geographical regions. Both versions have recourse to the language of novelty and strangeness in their presentation of the world beyond Europes shorelines. In Edens Treatyse the terms
that distinguish the south from the north come into view quite clearly as
generalized descriptors that place Europe in relation to a generalized, decentered realm across the seas.
The English-language editions of Mnsters text are of great interest for
what they teach us about the hermeneutics of form. The piecing together of
textual elements for a new audience brings to light strategies for making meaning that may go unnoticed in a volume whose raison dtre appears not to need
explanation and whose seams are less apparent. Before turning to Edens and
Marshes editions of Mnsters cosmography, however, it is worth examining
the original volume for a moment.
Mnsters division of his material into four parts follows an organizing
principle derived from Ptolemaic geography; it affirms old knowledge systems
even as it makes visible the limitations of that inheritance. These regional categorizations are not hermetically sealed, however: the cosmography creates
linkages across distinct regions in the global south, suggesting that they bear
the same human face. Woodcut images, used to illustrate chapters describing
regions within Africa, are transposed and reused in relation to India. There are
a number of examples. In Book VI, titled De Africae regionibus (or, Of the
regions of Africa), an image of a young African woman in a short grass skirt
appears on page 1155. The image is embedded within a block of textual discussion under the subheading, De Azanegis et Tagaza salis minera (Of the
Azanegis and Tagaza salt mine).11 This is not the first time a reader would have
encountered this image: it also appears within a section headed De Aethiopia
et Interiori Lybia (page 1145). This repetition of what appears to be a generic
African young woman is not necessarily remarkable. What does seem surprising, however, is that this image appears again on page 1066 in a sub-section titled De terris Asiae maioris (Of the lands of Greater Asia). Greater Asia is
imagined with the same human shape, as it were, as Ethiopia and Libya.
More startling still is the double use of the image of a very darkly rendered
naked man and a light-skinned figure, wearing a long piece of cloth draped
down from the head, hand outstretched. This image appears on page 1106 in
the chapter on De Africae regionis (On the regions of Africa) as a repetition of an image that had appeared just twenty pages earlier in a section titled
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13
Fig. 2: Woman in grass

skirt in De Africae regionibus in Sebastian
Mnsters Cosmographiae Universalis, p. 1155.
Source: ETH-Bibliothek Zrich, Alte und
Seltene Drucke.
Fig. 3: Woman in grass

skirt in De Aethiopia
et Interiori Lybia in
Sebastian Mnsters
Cosmographiae Universalis, p. 1145. Source:
ETH-Bibliothek
Zrich, Alte und Seltene Drucke.
De India ultra Ganges, on page 1080. The identification of India with the
river Ganges introduces a level of geographical specificity, and yet we also see
the texts dependence on myths inherited from antiquity in the marginal note
that appears next to the image accompanying text about India beyond the
Ganges, highlighting the appearance of pygmae. 12
The association between India and Ethiopia, through the ascription of the
term pygmae to groups of people in these regions, predates Mnsters text by
centuries. Homer had referred to people of short stature in Ethiopia in the
Iliad, and the Natural History of Pliny the Elder,13 too, refers to pygmies in a
number of places, for example in a passage in Book VI, which compares the
pygmies of India to the Ethiopians.14 The myth of the pygmy is thus not new,
but the reappearance of this myth as seemingly up-to-date geographical information in Mnsters compendium galvanizes the myth for a new epistemolog-
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Fig. 4: Woman in grass skirt in De terris Asiae maioris in Sebastian Mnsters Cosmographiae Universalis, p. 1066. Source: ETH-Bibliothek Zrich,
Alte und Seltene Drucke.
Fig. 5: Dark and light figures in De Africae regionis in Sebastian Mnsters

Cosmographiae Universalis, p. 1106. Source: ETH-Bibliothek Zrich, Alte und
Seltene Drucke.
Fig. 6: Dark and light figures in De India ultra Ganges, in Sebastian Mnsters Cosmographiae Universalis, p. 1080. Source: ETH-Bibliothek Zrich,
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15
ical moment. His deployment of the termand the imagefor use in relation
to Ethiopia and India repeats and reaffirms Homers association between
India (Eastern Ethiopia) and Africa (Western Ethiopia). The association
stems from the fact that these regions represent a limit point of geographical
knowledge in that they occupy the edges of the known world, as well as from a
mistrust of human difference. The deprecatory effects of this association are
well recognized. For example, Yaacov Shavit explains that in antiquity the association of India with Ethiopia stemmed from the perception that both,
[were] located at the ends of the earth, existing at the far edges of human
imagination; however, it was equally the result of the fact that a dark-skinned
population resided in southern India (219). Ethiopia functions in this generalizable fashion in the work of ancient geographers. The Greek geographer,
Strabo, affirmed in his Geographica that ancient geographers designated as
Ethiopia the whole of the southern countries towards the ocean (Strabo 1:2.27,
qtd. in Shavit 219). In his study of The First Ethiopians: The Image of Africa and
Africans in the Early Mediterranean World, Malvern van Wyk Smith argues
that the Homeric conceit of a western and eastern Ethiopia became a powerful and pervasive discriminatory template for the earliest Mediterranean and
subsequent European encounters with inner Africa, and for the earliest assessments of its peoples (3). Therefore, the visual association between India and
Ethiopia in Mnsters Cosmographiae has a long history; its emergence in this
work of serious learning affirms its relevance for a modern cosmography.
Most striking of all is the reappearance of the image of cannibals engaged
in food preparation, energetically chopping limbs on page 1094, in a section
devoted to the islands of the Indian Ocean (including Sumatra, Borneo, Java,
Madagascar and Zanzibar) and again as Canibali Anthropophagi in the islands of the New World (De Nouis Insulis) on page 1100. The repeated use of
this image reproduces the trope of man-eating monsters for figures in the islands of the Indian Ocean and the New World, giving them literally the same
form. A second recurring image of cannibalisma man roasting a human
body on a spitappears in a discussion of Greater Asia on page 1060 and again
in relation to the New World on page 1101.
Mnsters reuse of images has not received critical attention, even in studies concerned with the production of alterity.15 For example, in his study The
Curse of Ham in the Early Modern Era: The Bible and the Justifications for Slavery,
David Mark Whitford describes early modern anxieties about the threat that
derives from the peoples of the nether regions of the world (viii) and examines
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16
Fig. 7: Cannibals in the islands of Borneo in Sebastian Mnsters Cosmographiae

Universalis, p. 1105. Source: ETH-Bibliothek Zrich, Alte und Seltene Drucke.
Fig. 8: Canibali Anthropophagi in the islands of the New World in Sebastian

Mnsters Cosmographiae Universalis, p. 1100. Source: ETH-Bibliothek Zrich,
Fig. 9: Cannibals in Greater Asia in Sebastian Mnsters Cosmographiae Universalis, p.1060. Source: ETH-Bibliothek Zrich, Alte und Seltene Drucke.
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17
the role of exploration narratives and cosmographies in popularizing the myth

of the curse of Ham. Even though Whitford includes in his preface a reproduction of a Woodcut illustrating Antipodal people from Book VI of the Cosmographiae (viii), there is no further comment on Mnsters use and reuse of
woodcut images and the implications this might have had for the dissemination of the myths regarding the alterity of peoples of the world less familiar to
European explorers and their readers.
Whitfords study is an example of the rich set of reflections scholars might
offer on the discourses of pejorative differentiation at play in the period and the
brutal impact of the legitimization of these early forms of racism. The field of
early modern studies remains divided about the appropriateness of both the
term race as an analytical category in discussing a period whose use of the
term differed markedly from current usage, as well as the binaristic language of
post-colonial studies to conceptualize the power dynamics at play in what
might otherwise be thought of as cultural contact or exchange. 16 For Ania
Loomba the critical issue that will determine whether scholars are able to attend to relations of power in early modernitys scenes of contact is the line on
difference (Review 272)that is to say, whether scholars are willing to recognize the mechanisms of power in cultural exchange, or not.17 Michael
Neills well-known essay on Othello and Early Modern Constructions of
Human Difference found an incisive way to discuss the fundamental significance of constructions of alterity in Othello while acknowledging that the language of race is anachronistic for the period.18
There is another vocabulary available to early modern scholars for thinking
about global asymmetries of power in early modernity and the discursive systems that endorse them. The terms produced by the geographical coordinates
are not anomalous in the period. That is to say, the early geographies used
broad designations of the southern parts of the world or the south to establish a social hierarchy on a global scale.
Laying out the south partes of the world:
Richard Edens Treatyse of the Newe India
In his translation of Mnster, Richard Eden makes a clear distinction between
south and north as he invites his European readers to imagine the commodities to be found in Africa, the Americas, and India. The primary categories of differentiation he creates are north, where it is cold and the topography
is already known, and south, where it is hot and rich in desirable natural
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18
Fig. 10: Title page from Richard Edens Treatyse of the Newe India. Source: John
Carter Brown Library at Brown University.
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19
products (sig. aa.vi.v). His use of the term south is entirely relative, however:
he is referring to the south partes of the world betwene the two Tropikes
vnder ye Equinoctial or burning lyne, where the sunne is of greatest forse...
where Golde, Spyces, Apes, and Elephantes are nowe founde (sig. aa.vi.rv).
What he calls the south partes of the world do not necessarily correspond
with the southern hemisphere as such: Ethiopia is in this south and so is
Mauritania, Marmarica [the northern coast of Africa], Ethiopia, Libia, and
Arabia (sig. aa.vi.v). This is not the result of limited knowledge or cartographic
inaccuracies. The fact that Ethiopia does not lie on or below the Equator, but
above it, is acknowledged in the final chapter, which corrects Pliny for thinking
that Ethiopia lies under the Equator and is thus uninhabitable: Whether
vnder the quinoctial circle or burninge lyne . . . be habitable Regions
(Miii.v).19 The designation south is not primarily or definitively a matter of
latitudinal positioning. Rather, the south or southern partes are those regions where sought-after commoditiesgold,20 spices, camels, elephants
tusksare to be found and where there is wonder to be had, on account of the
strangeness or greatness of what is to be found there: as Eden promises his
reader, the sodeyn straungenes or greatnes of the thing shal not so much
amase thy wittes, and gender in thee incrudelitie, yf thou confider the saying of
wyse Salomon, who affyrmeth yat there is no new thing vnder the Sunne (sig.
aa.v.v).
While suggesting that this apparent novelty is in fact ancient truth, Eden
offers grounds for correcting a common understanding of the Old Testament
by proposing that Solomons gold was not from this Tharsis of Cilicia, but
from some other country in the south partes of the world (sig. aa.vii.v). Edens
proposal that the southern partes of the world are sources of exploitable resources, exotic spices, amazement and incrudelitie (sig. aa.vii.v) is underwritten by both modern and ancient ways of knowing, he would have us believe,
from Solomon and olde... Histories to the principles of natural Philosophie and that most modern path to knowledge, dayly experience (sig.
aa.vii.v).21 But, in truth, his correction is based on little other than speculation
and the firm association he establishes between the southern partes of the
world, exploitable commodities, and exoticism. Nicols Wey Gmez has
drawn our attention to the impact of a similar set of assumptions informing
Columbuss choice to sail south, and not only west. As Gomz rightly insists,
this aspect of Columbuss geography continues to play a negligible role in
standard treatments of his celebrated enterprise (4) though it was recognized
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20
by his first chroniclers (5), such as Peter Martyr. Gmez argues that prevailing assumptions about the southern latitudes enabled him to believe not only
that he was about to venture into the most sizable and wealthiest lands of the
globe, but also that the peoples he would encounter in those latitudes were
bound to possess a natureranging from childish to monstrousthat
seemed to justify rendering them Europess subjects or slaves (xiv).
Similarly, Edens language suggests that the impulse to categorize the
world into regions of relative social and economic powerthrough the vague,
and not altogether accurate, geopolitical terms south and northinformed
and legitimated the imperialist and acquisitive impulses of the early explorers.
This language, thus, predates recent critical interest in the concept of a global
south by a matter of centuries. Even so, the usefulness (or not) of the analytical category of the global south warrants consideration, here, for use in a
study of sixteenth-century texts. Its rise to prominence in recent years does not
in itself justify the appropriateness of my reaching for it as a term in this current study. The terms historical and geographical nebulousness does not recommend it; as an abstraction it is no more meaningful than the theoretical
catch-all terms made available through postcolonial theory. The responsibility
to do the careful work of analyzing the operations of power remains. The term
itself is too unspecific to be able to contribute usefully to the work of history,
unless we examine just how the conceptualization of the southern regions of
the world was marshaled, and to what effect.
Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff have described the term global south
as inherently slippery, inchoate, unfixed (45). And like all indexical signs,
the global south assumes meaning by virtue not of its content but of its context and its relation to its unnamed opposite, the global north, an opposition
that carries a great deal of imaginative baggage congealed around the contrast
between centrality and marginality, capitalist modernity and its absence (45).
Just how the imaginative baggage accrues is a matter of material and historical practice, subject to scrutiny. The category itself is an idea, a construct that
signals an imagined relation as much now as it might have been in the sixteenth
century. The critical usefulness of the term is not its purported content:
for the south cannot be defined, a priori, in substantive terms. The label
bespeaks a relation, not a thing in or for itself. It is a historical artifact, a
labile signifier in a grammar of signs whose semiotic content is determined, over time, by everyday material, political, and cultural processes...
whatever it may connote at any given moment, it always points to an
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21
ex-centric location, an outside to Euro-America. (47; italics in

original)
The south as invoked here is a relational category whose meanings bear significance only by virtue of its position in relation to the privileged north. The
authors of Theory From the South attribute no substantive meaning to the
term. Its content is only purported and has little referential weight. But as a
critical term, it directs us to a useful lexicon and helps to make visible a framework through which asymmetries of power are reinforced in the age of
expansionism.
The volumes I examine here show us that early modern texts themselves
adopted this vocabulary. The compilations coming off sixteenth-century European presses deployed the term south or the southern parts of the world to
point to regions on the margins of the world best known to Europe, often without specificity, substance or accuracy. This vocabulary adds to our understanding of the periods treatment of human difference and its dependence on
emergent knowledge practices for a conceptual system that would mitigate the
unsettling effects of the encounter with far-off peoples. These representational
mechanisms helped to establish the peoples of the south as objects of an inquiring gaze from the north and to reframe constructions of human difference
as scientific knowledge.
Of strange and memorable things:
Thomas Marshes edition of Mnsters Cosmographiae
When Thomas Marshe in 1572 offers his readers a briefe collection and compendious extract of the strange and memorable things (t.p.) from across the
Atlantic and a short reporte of strange histories of diverse men (sig. Aiir) in a
second collection of excerpts from Mnsters Cosmographiae Universalis, his
promise of captivation rests on two elements of knowledge production that are
familiar to us in the modern academy: compelling novelty and the creditable
form that will underwrite its claims with a show of scholarliness. No doubt his
contemporaries would have noted, as we do, that Marshes sensationalism exceeds the bounds of the formal structures he chooses for his tales (that is, the
compendium and the report). This natural history barely bothers to differentiate between regions and species. We read of the marvaylous folishnes of the
ostrydge (sig. 94r) and of pigmies who are good christians and giant
Ethiopes in Africa (sig. 100v); of canniballsa wylde people (sig. 96r)
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22
and man-taming Amazons in an unnamed territory (sig. 55r); of dragons (sig.

79v) and monstruouse people (sig. 82r) in India; and of Aetna, a mervaylous
hill which burns continually with terrible flames, horrible to be sene
(sig.12v).22 As a genre, the sixteenth-century compilation professed compendious coverage and disinterested reportage. And yet it was also available as a
container for tales of the bizarre, despite the emerging concern with demonstrable reliability.
This text is Marshes English translation of Sebastian Mnsters Cosmographi universalis (1572). It is not a full and complete reproduction of Mnsters
tome. Rather, Marshe chooses only excerpts of what is strange and titillating in
his chosen extracts from Mnsters narrative, as his title promises:
A briefe collection and compendious extract of the strau[n]ge and memorable
things, gathered oute of the cosmographye of Sebastian Mnster. Where in is
made a playne descrypsion of diuerse and straunge lawes rites, manners, and
properties of sundry nacio[n]s, and a short reporte of straunge histories of diuerse men, and of the nature and properties of certayne fowles, fishes, beastes,
monsters, and sundrie countries and places. (sig. Aiir)
And yet it is not only titillation that Marshes title promises, in the idea of
strange and memorable things. It also demonstrates the faithfulness to established conventions: the claim to compendiousness, that is, the quality of being
both brief and comprehensive; the promise of plainness, that is, a disavowal of
polish and misleading embellishment, and therefore an implicit claim to truthfulness (and this while promising an account of monsters); the attempt to account for all of the natural world, in this case living creatures (to paraphrase
slightly, birds of the air, fishes of the sea, beasts of the field, various human nations, which is to say, races, and monsters); and to account for basic human activity, that is, the washing rituals, the manners (or customs) and the
properties (that is, natural properties, or characteristics, as used in relation to
animals in the same title) of the diverse peoples of the world.
Though it is an example of a particularly sensationalist text, as it turns out,
and not completely true to Mnsters more even-tempered effort to present a
full account of the world methodically, Marshes compilation is nonetheless
able to find authority in the form of the compilation itself and to assemble its
salacious material from Mnsters compilation, enthralling its readers while
purporting all the while to offer only plain descriptions in an orderly, respectable form. What invites probing is how the compilation itself, as a form, helps
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23
Marshe and other compilers achieve this embrace of sensationalism and seriousness, all the while providing the discursive context in relation to which the
European armchair traveler constructs both his world and sense of identity in
relation to the New World, as represented in its pages. Moreover, there is great
pleasure to be found in learning of far countries and the straunge practices
of far distante nacions (sig. A.iv.r), a pleasure made available to readers
through their immersion in the text and through their anticipated identification with the traveler so that they themselves may wander through out the
whole world (sig. A.iii.v).
In Marshes sensationalist pages, the peoples of sundry nacions appear
marvelous and monstrous, but the particular thrill of this discovery derives
from the form that promises coherence and the respectability of a presentation
of knowledgethe compilation. In this instance the compiler goes so far as to
explain his understanding of the particular delectation that is to be found in
reading newes (novelty that is invested with the status of truth) in a volume
which is able to offer a combinacion of contrary thinges (sig. A.iii.r). It is in
oure nature, he writes, that we cannot take continuall delectation or pleasure
alwayes in one kinde of thinge, but naturallye wee are inclined and desire to be
pertakers of newes, of straunge and vnaccustomed thinges, of variable and diuerse matters whiche may breeded some admiracion to any of oure sences
(sig.A.iii.r).
In flaunting what is deemed strange for readerly consumption, Marshe
does not signal his endeavor to reach for scholarliness as carefully as other
compilers of his day were at pains to do. Prominent compilers like Richard
Eden and Richard Hakluyt were attuned to the changing sensibilities of their
increasingly educated book-buying market and were more careful to deploy the
emerging codes of scholarly literacy in seeking to represent the rest of the world
to an avid European readership. But what exactly is it that they do better than
Marshe, we might ask. How do they signal their seemingly laudable intentions
on the pagethrough what textual and book-making practicesand what are
the political effects of these practices? As a genre the compilation embraced
texts as divergent as poetry and astronomical treatises. These texts together
produced New World difference, and managed that difference so successfully
that by the end of the sixteenth century the New World could figure as an eminently inhabitable world.
What we have seen is that when the same source materialSebastian
Mnsters German-language Cosmographie of 1544is used to present materi-
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24
als on the Americas in Richard Edens A treatyse of the newe India, the effects
are somewhat different: in its framing and structure, Edens compilation seems
to anticipate scholarly approval, whereas in Marshes compilation the nod to
learning appears to be more perfunctory, a validation of its flaunting of the bizarre. But the more even-handed Eden compilation, too, appeals to a sense of
curiosity, and the readers fascination to know more. Both compilations invite
their readers into an encounter with alterity that is legitimized by the forms
association with matters of learning.
Strangeness and the limits of understanding:
Peter Martyrs Decades of the Newe World
The compilations that were tasked with representing the new world to the
old in this period nurtured European imaginings of the New World in quite
different wayssome capitalizing on salacious details, others endeavoring to
accommodate the new material into existing conceptual systems with a scholarly seriousness, or deferring to biblical cosmologies when this was no longer
possible. When Peter Martyr in his Decades of the Newe World contemplates
the phenomenon of skin color in a brief discussion Of the colour of the Indians (sig. 310v) he transforms the incongruity of referring to race with reference
to the color spectrum (purple, yelowe, chestnutte, as well as blacke and
whyte [sig. 310v]) into an opportunity to pay reverence to Gods creative powers. The difference between populations, under his pen, becomes one of the
marueylous things that God vseth in the composition of man (sig. 310v). His
table establishes what he calls the colour of the Indians as an object of investigation in the singular (sig. b.iii.r), but in his narrative under this subject heading a whole field of difference is opened up. Interestingly, the European
observers themselves are included as objects in that field of difference:
Therfore in lyke maner and with suche diuersitie as men are commonly
whyte in Europe and blacke in Affrike, euen with like varietie are they
tawny in these Indies, with dyuers degrees diuersly inclynynge more or
lesse to blacke or whyte. No lesse maruayle is it to consyder that men are
whyte in Siuile and blacke at the cape of Buena Speranza, and of chestnutte colour at the ryuer of Plata, bringe all in equall degrees frome the
Equinoctiall line. (sig. 310v311r)
The passage is remarkable for the way it moves from an identification of absolute difference, in holding one to be white, and another blacke, being colours
5/21/15 1:20 PM
25
vtterly contrary (sig. 310v; emphasis added) to a sense of difference as multiple

and subtle, as it were by degrees (sig. 310v). He identifies difference also within
the categories of distinction: as some men are white after diuers sorts of whitenesse, yelowe after diuers manners of yelow, & blacke after diuers sorts of blackenesse (sig. 310v) and goes on to enumerate various gradations of color, including
purple (sig. 310v). His tone is measured in its explication of the phenomenon of
color which, he clarifies, is not attributable to sun exposure as manie haue
thought (sig. 310v). He refers to lines of latitude in drawing this conclusionfor
the men of Affrike and Asia, that lyue vnder the burnt lyne (called Zona Torrida) are blacke: and not they that lyue beneath, or on this side of the same lyne,
as in Mexico... and Peru, which touch in the same quinoctial (sig. 311r). He
concludes therefore that such varyety of colours proceedeth of man, & not of
the earth (sig. 311r). But this is where his reasoning breaks down in the face of
his Bible-based cosmology: although we bee all borne of Adam and Eue, and
knowe not the cause why God hath so ordeyned it, otherwise then to consider that
his diuine maiesty hath done this, as infinite other, to declare his omnipotency and
wisedome, in such diuersities of colours (sig. 311r). When his reasoning reaches its
limit, he defers to God and his passage becomes an expression of faith in the face of
an inability to explain a phenomenon of he cannot understand.
But Peter Martyr goes even further. With a marginal note for emphasis, he
declares that Gods wisedome and power is seene in his workes (sig. 311r) and
directs the reader to the study of nature and to natural philosophy to understand what has been, up until this point, beyond comprehension. The secrets
of nature may be unfathomable and cause for reverence and faith, but they are
nonetheless worth searching out through learning. The place to search out
these secrets that bear on human understanding of the very nature of things
is, notably, in the novelties of the newe worlde: All which things may give
further occasions to Philosophers to search the secrets of nature, and complexions of men (sig. 311r). Peter Martyrs New World is thus identified with learning, in contrast to Thomas Marshes characterization of the New World as a
place of disconcerting strangeness, the home of human-eating and threatening
Caribs, as we have already seen. For Peter Martyr, strangeness is transformed
into novelty and filled with possibility and with interest, not so much for its
exoticism, but for the light it may shed on the nature of being human in an increasingly complex world.
Many of the books seek to represent something of this complexity and
claim to offer illumination of some sort and a certitude that is secured through
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26
the figure of the author. But authorship is anything but certain; and in the volume that bears the English title of Pietro Martire dAnglieris narrative history,
Edens silent work of textual assemblage is hidden behind the unitary Peter
Martyr, as I demonstrate below. The English-language version of the Decades
is a new textual artifact altogether, translated and reframed by Eden as
compiler.
Eden writes his own prefatory materiala dedication in Latin and a
lengthy epistle to the readerexplaining the significance and history of Peter
Martyrs work and the events he describes. He also appends paratextual elements which help to mark the contents as knowledge, such as a table of contents, a glossary of terms (many of which are geographical in nature, such as
continente, hemispherum, parallele, and clime [sig. b.iv.r]), and a brief,
half-page list of words from the Indian language and their translations (including the words for sun, moon, man, woman, sword, gold, priest, house, and
a few more). This list constitutes a crude replica of the original five-page glossary, titled Vocabula Barbara, which appears at the end of Peter Martyrs
original Latin edition.23 Edens Table and the section headings that reflect the
subject matter are his innovation, however, and read as a foretaste of the books
substance.
By contrast, Peter Martyrs Latin original is structured as a set of decades, or chapters, each subdivided into caputs, whose headings simply identify the sequential order, duly numbered. The content consists of narrative
accountsEden refers to them as hystorye[s] (sig. a.ii.r), as opposed to vayne
fables (sig. b.ii.v), or in the word given to the title, decades (t.p.). These are
chapters in a larger chronicle of events, but written after the maner of epistel
(sig. d.iv.r), as Peter Martyr describes them. Martyrs text constitutes, as Eden
puts it, a hystory of suche thynges as wherof he hath seene a great parte him
selfe (sig. a.ii.r) or, where he was not personally present, such monuments as
are most certaine testimonies of theyr doynge, as you may reade in dyvers
places of this boke (sig. a.ii.r). But Edens claims here are misleading: Peter
Martyr never traveled to the New World himself, and his narratives are rewritings of the narratives of others, so the eyewitness claim is rather weak. There is,
however, rhetorical muscle in Edens framing of Martyrs volume as creditable
history and as a consistent testament to the positive impacts of imperialism.
The subtle shifts in structure, as I see it, are significant because they direct the
readers orientation to the material, turning Martyrs contradictory narratives
into unlikely evidence of the merits of imperialism, and into material which
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27
Fig. 11: Title page of Peter Martyrs Decades of the Newe World. Source: John
Carter Brown Library at Brown University.
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28
places the people of the New World as objects of geographical knowledge, as a

closer examination of Edens prefatory material makes clear.
Eden appropriates the conviction about Spanish imperialismarticulated
in part through Peter Martyrs affirmations of his royal Spanish patrons, the
imperialists Ferdinand and Isabellain order to advocate for English imperialism and lament the fact that England lags behind.24 A marginal note declares
England impouerisshed, Spayne inriched (sig. b.iv.r) on account of Spanish
imperial prowess. Eden preempts the discomfort his readers might feel contemplating Spanish plundering of the New World, by providing comparisons
from antiquity and by recasting Spanish imperialist violence as heroical and
comparatively mercyfull: we are told that the heroical factes of the Spaniardes of these days deserue so greate prayse that thauthour of this booke
(beinge no Spanyarde) doth woorthely extolle theyr doynge aboue the famous
actes of Hercules and Saturnus (sig. a.ii.r). The excessive violence of those ancient warriors and of Alexander and the Romans serves as a contrast, Eden
insists, to the Spaniards who in theyr mercyfull warres ageynst these naked
people haue so used themselues towarde them in exchaungynge of benefites for
victorie, that greater commoditie hath therof ensuwed to the vanquished then
the victourers (sig. a.ii.v). The benefits accruing to the Indians are more significant than the rich commodities the Spanish have found in the New World,
Eden would have us believe; even as he lists the golde, perles, precious stones
and such other (sig. a.ii.r) that Spanish imperialism yielded, a marginal note
highlights the benefites that the Indians haue receaued by the Spanyardes
(sig. a.ii.r). This is partly because he can point to a figure of greater ferocity, the
cruell Canibales (sig. a.ii.v) from whom the Indians have been protected, now
that they have been brought to ciuilitie through their encounter with the
Spaniards.
But Andrew Hadfield has shown that a gap exists between Edens celebration of Spanish conquest and Peter Martyrs somewhat ambivalent narratives,
which both celebrate and question the Spanish presence in the Americas.
Hadfield describes a strange and fascinating confrontation between the Spanish conquistadores led by Vasco Nunez de Balboa and the son of the local king,
Comogrus (2). Peter Martyrs account places the Spanish under scrutiny and
renders them somehow equivalent to the cannibals, by giving voice to the perspective of the Comogruan king: Both are exiles, the Spanish forced to live
like banished men owte of [their] owne countrey, thys wanderinge kinde of
men, the cannibals lyving withowte lawes, wanderinge, and withowte em-
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29
pire (Hadfield 6). In Hadfields reading of Peter Martyr, the Spanish are
shown to be cruel and greedy, not unlike the cannibals:
[B]oth restless peoples are ruled by an inordinate and destructive greed in
contrast to the relative social harmony of the Comogruans; both bring appalling destruction in their wake; both are cruel and blind to what really
matters; neither is capable of setting down a workable and settled system
of laws; both are dangerous vagabonds who threaten social stability and
know no boundaries, the Spanish as colonists cut off from their homeland
(which perhaps condemned many of them to a life of bondmen), the cannibals as men without a nation. (Hadfield 67)
The definitive parallels do not quite acknowledge the subtle distinction in

tenor between the kings characterization of the Spanish conquistadors, on the
one hand, who are (merely) like banished men, and the cannibals, on the
other hand, who have no claim to country and who are withowte laws. Still,
the compelling congruencies Hadfield finds are not only the result of his comparative structure; the kings assessments of Spanish practices have a disconcertingly defamiliarizing effect.
Thus, despite Edens protestations, Hadfield argues, Peter Martyrs narrative does not support Edens claims for it (15).25 Furthermore, an astute reader
would certainly be able to glimpse the contestations and battles over land and
power, and the authors discomfort with Spanish acts of cruelty. Edens volume
obscures these unresolved contestations by setting the narrative accounts behind a layer of prefatory matter that, first, excuses and minimizes Spanish cruelty and, second, highlights for the reader the knowledge-producing value of
the Decades by invoking the language and the organizational structure of the
compilation. The structural mechanisms of the compilation formalize Martyrs open-ended observations, producing something that might be recognized
as knowledge. The table of contents, for example, stabilizes elements within
Peter Martyrs accounts into rigid objects, converting inconclusive experience
into an inventory.
The table translates the more unstable form of the narrative into identifiable events that function as objects to be known. In this sense the table itself is
not a neutral representational mechanism, despite its seemingly disinterested,
methodical appearance. Even a cursory glance at the table demonstrates that
the language of the headings renders the indigenous Americans as passive objects,
available to be known, in a way that is not true of the Europeans (in this case,
5/21/15 1:21 PM
Fig. 12: Table of Contents from Peter Martyrs Decades of the Newe World. Source: John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.
30
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31
the Spaniards). Headings like Of the colour of the Indians and Of the Tartars (sig.b.iii.r) situate the indigenous peoples in the accusative case, in the
same way that land (Of Peru) and topographical features are situated, such as
Of the greate river cauled Rio de la Plate (sig.b.iii.r). The Spaniards, by contrast, are placed in the nominative case, as subjects of active verbs: What
maner of man Christopher Colon was, and howe he came fyrste to the knowleage of the Indies and That the Spanyards have sayled to the Antipodes
(sig.b.iii.r).
We see a similar effectthe rendering of indigenous Americans as passive
objects to be described and knownin Thomas Harriots A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia. This Report takes two very different textual forms and as a result offers an opportunity for comparing the ideological
effects of textual form. An elegant, folio-sized volume compiled by Theodor de
Bry in 1590 establishes the indigenous Americans as passive objects of natural
history, available as items to be listed in a table of contents. By contrast, the
first edition of the Report, a more modest quarto published in 1588 soon after
Harriots return, is devoid of De Brys bibliographic apparatus and the beautiful engravings that made Harriots text famous. Harriots quarto of 1588 offers
only an eyewitness narrative of events. The ambivalence of the narrator regarding English irascibility and the disturbingly widespread deaths of the indigenous Americans, as if through invisible bullets, makes visible the troubling
effects of the English presence in Virginia in a way that the more ambitious and
beautiful De Bry edition does not.26
Edens stage-managing of Martyrs presentation of New-World accounts,
similarly, has an impact on the extent to which the volume allows its readers to
glimpse the contestationsindeed, the violenceof Spanish imperialism in
the New World, as well as the political contestations of the volumes moment
of production. Whereas Peter Martyrs narrative offers contradictory and ultimately unresolved accounts of Spanish aggression (or efficacy, when celebrated) in the New World, Edens repackaging of the Decades recasts the New
World as ripe for colonization from the north. Edens Decades echoes the Treatyse in its attempt, just two years earlier, to present the South as a source of
riches and wonders: in the Decades we are told of the ryche Ilandes of the
south sea cauled Mare del Sur, where the kynge of one little Ilande... payeth
yearely for his tribute a hundredth pounde weight of perles (sig. b.iv.r). Here,
as before, the language of geography is a key part of Edens discursive tool kit in
flaunting opportunities for colonization.
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32
Conclusion: Geography and the peoples of the torrid zones

The English volumes that packaged accounts of new worlds and told the stories of European encounters in the torrid zones drew on the language and the
structural features of an emergent geography. Even as they deployed terms derived from cartographys unchanging coordinates, these volumes helped to
build a new imaginary within which to conceptualize human difference across
the globe. Their allegiance to a geographical lexicon helped to position and
know the less empowered regions of the world. This process of making
known and somehow fixing, as formal knowledge, the habits of people unfamiliar to their Europeans readerstransforming what they do into what
they are, in the manner of Peter Martyrs table of contents aboverelied on a
language of representation that could distance itself from the implausible accounts of sensationalist writers like John Mandeville who, by the sixteenth
century, lacked the credibility to be considered authoritative. The imaginative
work of giving shape to new worlds relied on the technologies of observing,
recording and packaging knowledge. It called for representational forms that
could signal a departure from older narrative forms such as fable and establish
a conceptual grid for a new moment of global expansionism.
As a bibliographic form, the compilation was compendious enough to accommodate representations of the novelties of abundant new worlds with a
professedly scholarly refinement: the all-embracing compilations of the sixteenth century helped their readers to make sense of a seemingly uncontained,
expanded world not only through their sheer bulk but also in the representational strategies that could accommodate an increasingly complicated world.
The complex biographies of the texts themselvesthe accumulation and packaging of contributing elements, the changed iterations of translated texts, the
editorial efforts at reframing narratives for a new context, and the deployment
of images and tablesoffer indications of the role of texts in constructing and
explaining a world of difference. The volumes themselves help to establish the
terms and assumptions by which human difference could be understood.
I have argued that the language of geography, as well as its representational
practices, contributed a great deal to the shifting modes of representation. And
yet the shift in knowledge practices evident in sixteenth-century geographies is
not a thoroughgoing departure from ancient assumptions about the worlds of
Africa and India. Even Sebastian Mnsters avowedly scholarly cosmography of 1544, with its up-to-date inclusion of the Americas, echoes centuries-old
myths about Ethiopia and India, reanimating these myths as seemingly cur-
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33
rent geographical information. Mnsters enormous volume sets up equivalences between disparate regions across the globe; regions as far apart as India,
Ethiopia and Brazil become mirrored in the imagined bodily appearance,
dress, and cannibalistic practices of the respective regions inhabitants.
These alignments are reinforced more explicitly through the New World discourse which Mnsters English translators repeatedly invoke and through their
explicit dependence on the cardinal direction of the south, an inexact but powerful descriptor of far-off regions, as I have argued. With their wordy reframing of
continental geography, these smaller English-language volumesRichard Edens
translation of Mnsters Cosmographiae, published as A treatyse of the newe India,
and Thomas Marshes A briefe collection and compendious extract of the strau[n]ge
and memorable things, which flaunts strangeness from the startdraw on the language of geography to inspire Englands fledgling colonial ambitions. Edens translation and compilation of excerpts of Sebastian Mnster and Peter Martyrs texts
produce a global conceptual grid that renders the imperialist exploitation of less
empowered regions of the world reasonable. The volumes themselves, particularly
when read in relation to their sources, make visible the contribution of early modern English print culture to the construction of a global south. Through a lexicon
that derives from the geographical purchase on a wider world, the texts help to position the unfamiliar and far-off peoples of the torrid zones within a global social
hierarchy. This deployment of a vague but seemingly unimpeachable cartographic
system has devastating implications for the global south: for under Edens pen, the
south veritably invites exploitation, for both wealth and learning.
notes
1. Born in Italy as Pietro Martire dAnghiera, he was known to his English readership as
Peter Martyr, the name inscribed on Richard Edens English translation of his compilation
De Orbe Novo, published in English in 1555 as Decades of the Newe World. He was a chronicler
of the Spanish empire, commissioned as royal chronicler to Queen Isabella of Spain and later
Charles I of Spain (or, Charles V, in his capacity as the Holy Roman Emperor). His Decades of
the Newe World helped to establish the language and orientation of the Americas, the image
of it as a place of wondrous novelty, of promise, of innocence, and, in particular, of learning.
He was famously the first to challenge Columbus on whether or not he had indeed reached
the Indies. Nicols Wey Gmez describes him as the earliest known chronicler of the Indies... who instantly doubted whether Columbus had sailed far enough to have reached the
Indies (Tropics of Empire 136).
2. See, for example, Tzvetan Todorov, whose influential study of early America, The
Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, explicitly draws on the language of postcolonialism. Peter Hulme deploys colonial discourse analysis to powerful effect in Colonial
Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 14921797, sparking a productive debate with
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34
Myra Jehlen regarding representations of alterity and the historicity of cannibalism (see Jehlen). More recently, postcolonial binaries themselves have come under scrutiny. As Daniel
Vitkus has argued, the binary opposition between colonized and colonizer, so familiar in
recent scholarship informed by postcolonial identity politics, cannot be maintained in a
properly historicized description of Englands early modern culture (2).
3. See also footnote 16, below, for a brief discussion of Jerry Brottons important contribution to conceptualizations of early modern cultural, political and economic relations,
based on the trope of the bazaar.
4. Carey argues that commentators worried about the impact of travel precisely because they accepted the commensurability of human beings, and therefore the capacity of
the English to become like those they observed and with whom they lived (40).
5. As Jehlen sees it, the Caribs/cannibals need to be granted a portion of humanity
before they can be seen worthy of annihilation for their inhumanity. Thus it is their categorical humanity that places them beyond the pale (152).
6. Jehlens well-known debate with Peter Hulme takes issue with Hulmes method of
exposing, through colonial discourse analysis, the unreliability of European accounts of
cannibalism; for by dismissing the possibility of cannibals, Hulme does not just erase this
sign of alterity, he writes over it (171). To appreciate fully the Americans potential resistance to European modes of being and thus to qualify difference, Jehlen charges, we need
to know more about its content, not less (159). Similarly, for Jehlen, Tzvetan Todorovs
reading of Columbuss diaries, and his commitment to exposing the Europeans manipulation of language and power in the face of the Americans relative artlessness, risks repeating
the misrecognition that he condemns in Columbus.
7. See Chartiers discussion of espaces lisibles (3) and note 16, below.
8. The cardinal directions East and West have similarly provided a lens through
which to read global relations, following a long historiographical tradition, reignited for
scholarship through Edward Saids Orientalism. See for example, Mary Baine Campbells
The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 4001600, whose chapters are structured into two parts, titled The East and The West.
9. Matthew McLean, whose detailed study of Mnsters Cosmographiae is, itself, a
monumental work of scholarship, puts it this way: Such was the works popularity that it
ultimately went through 35 editions in five languages over the course of 85 years (1).
10. The translations followed rapidly: a second, even larger Latin edition in 1550, expanded to include the new materials generated after the 1544 edition; a French edition in
1552; a Czech edition in 1554; and an Italian edition in 1558, reprinted at intervals over the
course of the next century.
11. Unless stated otherwise, the translations of these headings are mine.
12. Anthropologists have traced the passage from Western mythology to succeeding
periods of ethnographic observation. Writing about a much later period of encounter than
the period of my study, Chris Ballard explains how the pursuit of knowledge has merely led
to new reiterations of the myth of the pygmy: Pygmy mythology in the West has its origins in classical Greek and medieval European legend. Subsequent encounters with short
peoples, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onwards, have failed to release Pygmies
from this prison-house of myth. Earlier myths have been exposed, only to be supplanted
by others (Ballard 130). See also Ballards subsequent study on Pygmies in the Colonial
Imaginary in which he refers to pygmies as a sheet anchor for racial hierarchies since
antiquity (133).
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35
13. See Trevor Murphy for an exposition of Plinys Natural History and its alignment
with imperialist modes of thought. Despite its objective of gathering reliable knowledge
about the natural world, the Natural History owes more to literary tradition than empirical observation (5). See also Doodys book length study of Plinys epistemological methodologies (the list) and the hierarchical logic informing his organization of knowledge,
a hierarchy in which privileged terms accrue value over their opposites: the earliest, the
tallest, the biggest, the most numerous and even the most expensive all provide starting
points for Plinys catalogues (n.p.).
14. In the region to the south of the Ganges the tribes are browned by the heat of the
sun to the extent of being coloured, though not as yet burnt black like the Aethiopes; the
nearer they get to the Indus the more colour they display. We come to the Indus immediately after leaving the Prasii, a tribe in whose mountain regions there is said to be a race of
Pygmaei (Pliny Book VI).
15. Admittedly, the production of a text like the Cosmographiae involves a number of
actors, and the placement of images were the domain of the printer, not the author, making
this an awkward matter for scholarly analysis, though not necessarily an improper one.
Roger Chartier has called for textual critics to attend to what he calls the espaces lisibles
(or readable spaces) using a methodology that combines textual criticism, bibliography,
and cultural history (3). Certainly, images may form a significant aspect of a texts hermeneutics and contribute to its unspoken rhetorical force. In a recent article I considered the
reuse of Hans Burgkmairs woodcut images in different textual contexts and its contribution to the construction of a category of alterity. It became clear that Burgkmairs images
were able to contribute, in particular ways, to a partisan new world discourse, turning
long-established territories into exotic lands and establishing a racialized imaginary with
which the people of the global south became understood (Young, Envisioning the people
of new worlds 50).
16. Jerry Brotton, for example, evokes the metaphor of the Eastern bazaar to talk
about cultural exchange in the period, and although he is careful to register the darker
side of the Renaissance (Renaissance Bazaar 10) within this notion of cultural exchange,
the metaphor of exchange leads to a particular characterization of the effects of the contact that resulted from European expansionism, rendering it a matter of mutual influence
and enrichment and obscuring the devastating effects of some scenes of imperial conquest.
17. In reviewing Speaking of the Moor: From Alcazar to Othello by Emily Bartels,
Loomba cites Bartelss formulation that how and where we draw the line on difference is
all important (Bartels 7); for Loomba, however, the shift in scholarship to notions of cultural exchange is susceptible to uncritical reproductionwhat she dismisses as the simplistic all is hybrid and multicultural argument (Loomba 26970).
18. Neill affirms that if the work of recent scholars has taught us anything about early
modern constructions of human difference, it is that any attempt to read back into the
early modern period an idea of race based on post-Enlightenment taxonomy is doomed
to failure (361).
19. The passage points out Ptolemys mistake, as follows: But Ptolomeus... placeth
a part of the Hand of Taprobana, vnder the Equinoctial, and also many nacions of the
Ethiopians, in the final chapter, Whether vnder the quinoctial circle or burninge lyne
(called Torrida zona) be habitable Regions (Miiii.r). The adjective equinoctial derives
from the state of equal day and night and is used in the late sixteenth century to refer to
the terrestrial equator, a usage now rare (Equinoctial).
5/21/15 1:22 PM
36
20. He argues that the vast quantities of gold Solomon accumulated were brought
thether from other countreyes in the southern partes by Marchauntes, along with the
spices and camels of which one reads in the third book of Kings (sig. aa.vii.r).
21. This is how Eden makes his case: I would rather thinke (sauing reformacion of
other better learned) that this Tharsis (and not Tharsis of Cilicia,) from whence Salomon
had so great plentie of Gold and luerie, were rather some other countrey in the south partes
of the world, then this Tharsis of Cilicia. For, not onely olde and newe Histories, dayly
experience, and the principles of natural Philosophie doe agree, yat the places most apte
to bring forth gold, spices, and precious stones, are the South and Southern partes of the
world (sig. aa.vii.v).
22. For scholarship on the category of the marvelous and wondrous in the early
modern period, see Stephen Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions; Lorraine Daston, Marvelous facts; and Mary Baine Campbell, Wonder and Science. I have written about the relationship between curiosity, wonder and early modernitys knowledge practices in a chapter
on Collecting Curiosities in The Early Modern Global South in Print: Textual Form and the
Production of Human Difference as Knowledge.
23. Petri Martyris, De Orbo Nouo Decades (sig. Cxviii.r).
24. Andrew Hadfield has argued that Edens text, dedicated to Queen Mary and her
new Spanish husband, Philip, following their marriage of July 1554, validates Spanish imperialism as a model and, importantly, affirms the new Marian reign: Edens comments
are also notable for their partiality. He is clearly reacting to Protestant anti-Spanish sentiment (Hadfield 15). Certainly, his Preface is at pains to affirm the noble and Catholyke
prince Ferdinand whose successful warres ageynste the Moores of Granada confirm that
he and the nation of the Spanyardes had byn appointed by God (sig. a.iv.v). Claire Jowitt,
however, offers the possibility that Edens interventions be read as a carefully encoded
critique of the uneasy English political situation of the 1550s (52) rather than a creditable
affirmation of Englands new Catholic monarchs, particularly given how unsuccessful he
was at ingratiating himself with the new regime: Eden was charged with heresy in 1555, just
after his translation appeared. Certainly one feels the sting of his condemnation of political
machinations in railings such as O unthankefull Englande and voyde of honest shame!
Who hath giuen the[e] the face of a hoore and toonge of a serpent withowt shame to speake
venomous words in secreates ageynst the annoynted of god (sig. b.i.v).
25. Hadfield explains it in this way: Ultimately, despite attempts to homogenize and
simplify the text, Edens English translation of De Orbe Novo Decades is as double and
contradictory as Peter Martyrs Latin original. In one sense Eden is glorifying the Spanish
in the New World and recommending them as heroic exemplars for the fragmented and
monstrous body politic of England. Their actions provide a recipe for unity and expansion
and will provide both internal and external cohesion illustrating that the forces of nationalism and colonialism cannot be easily separated. In another, there is an uncomfortable
link between Peter Martyrs descriptions of the rebellious acts of the conquistadores in the
Americas and Edens castigations of his fellow citizens crimes (17).
26. I have analyzed the two Harriot editions at length elsewhere in an effort to understand the impact of textual form in making visibleor notcolonial violence. See Young,
Narrating colonial violence.
5/21/15 1:22 PM
37
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Early Modern Constructions of A Global South

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The Secrets of Nature and Early Modern

Constructions of a Global South

For sixteenth-century natural historian Peter Martyr, human difference is a

novelties, which are waiting to be uncovered and explained through the

Youngt The Secrets of Nature

Youngt The Secrets of Nature

tween commensurability and incommensurability, or limited to categorizing

Youngt The Secrets of Nature

Fig. 1: Frontispiece of Sebastian Mnsters Cosmographiae Universalis. Source:

new, as I discuss at greater length below. Marshes version of Mnster is not

Youngt The Secrets of Nature

Fig. 2: Woman in grass

Fig. 3: Woman in grass

Fig. 5: Dark and light figures in De Africae regionis in Sebastian Mnsters

Youngt The Secrets of Nature

Fig. 7: Cannibals in the islands of Borneo in Sebastian Mnsters Cosmographiae

Fig. 8: Canibali Anthropophagi in the islands of the New World in Sebastian

Youngt The Secrets of Nature

the role of exploration narratives and cosmographies in popularizing the myth

Youngt The Secrets of Nature

Youngt The Secrets of Nature

ex-centric location, an outside to Euro-America. (47; italics in

and man-taming Amazons in an unnamed territory (sig. 55r); of dragons (sig.

Youngt The Secrets of Nature

Youngt The Secrets of Nature

vtterly contrary (sig. 310v; emphasis added) to a sense of difference as multiple

Youngt The Secrets of Nature

places the people of the New World as objects of geographical knowledge, as a

Youngt The Secrets of Nature

The definitive parallels do not quite acknowledge the subtle distinction in

Youngt The Secrets of Nature

Conclusion: Geography and the peoples of the torrid zones

Youngt The Secrets of Nature

Youngt The Secrets of Nature

Youngt The Secrets of Nature

Youngt The Secrets of Nature

Martyris, Petri, ab Angleria Mediolanensis. De Orbe Nouo Decades. Alcal: Michael de

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