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.