Seminar Reading

Christopher Columbus, Journal of the First Voyage. Ed. and Transl. with an Introduction and Notes by B.W.Ife (Warminster, 1990), introduction and Columbus Language, pp. V-XL

Greenblatt, Stephen, Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford, 1991), Introduction, pp. 1-25; Chapter 3: ‘Marvellous Possessions’, pp. 52-85.

Seminar/Essay Questions

• What shaped Columbus an other discoverers vision of the New World?

• Explain the role of ‘wonder’ in Columbus’s writings. How does Greenblatt interpret Columbus's experiences in the Caribbean?

Further Reading

Abulafia, David, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus (New Haven, 2008).

Brandon, William, New Worlds for Old: Reports from the New World and Their Effect on the Development of Social Thought in Europe, 1500-1800 (Athens, 1986).

Campbell, Mary B., The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400-1600 (Ithaca, 1989), chapter 5.

Elliott, J.H., Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (New Haven, 2006).

Fernandez-Armesto, Filipe, Columbus. Oxford, 1991.

Flint, Valerie, The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus (Princeton, 1992).

Grafton, Anthony, with April Shelford and Nancy Siraisi, New Worlds, Ancient Text: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of the New.

Hulme, Peter, ‘Tales of Distinction: European Ethnography and the Caribbean’, in Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, ed. by Stuart Schwartz (Cambridge, 1994).

Lestringant, Frank, Cannibals: The Discovery and Representation of the Cannibal from Columbus to Jules Verne (Berkeley, 1997), chap. 6: ‘Jean de Léry, or the Cannibal Obsession’, and chap. 8: ‘The Spitting Cannibal’.

Phillips, D. and Phillips, Carla Rahn, The World of Christopher Columbus (Cambridge, 1992).

Pagden, Anthony, European Encounters with the New World (New Haven, 1993).

Pastor Bodmer, Beatriz, The Armature of Conquest: Spanish Accounts of the Discovery of America, 1492-1589 (Stanford, 1992), chapter 1.