Year: 1994
Type: article
Abstract: still improperly understood, role in it.For, as Erasmus observed as early as 1517, if the ancient geographers were wrong in assuming that there were only three continents, might they not have been wrong in other respects, too?Once the hitherto unquestionable authority of one part of the canon had collapsed, might not all the other parts be suspect also?This is the subject of Grafton's book It was written around an exhibition held at the New York Public Library, and its argument was dictated by the library's collection of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century books, Despite the limitations this format necessarily imposes, this book offers a comprehensive and highly readable account of the role of other worlds in the European encounter with the "new," The book also, as Grafton claims, attempts to raise the level of debate in an areathe "relations between the West and the Rest" -in which the discussion has, in large part, been tendentious, self-serving, and crushingly banaL (Included here is a telling critique of the epigones of Edward Said,)Grafton is certainly the most interesting Renaissance scholar writing today.He is hugely learned and wide-ranging in his interests.He also writes with a flair and imagination few other scholars can match.If anyone can show what it might have been like to inhabit a world that looked on books "as the most powerful sources of knowledge .... like bombs, armed, powerful and ready at any moment to explode," it is he.Those who wish to understand the impact of the discovery of America on the science and philosophy of early modern Europe should begin here.
Author: John Jay Tepaske
Institution: Duke University
Language: Spanish
Subfield: Demography
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2092487930