Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic

Abstract

This book is ‘about humans and nature in the sixteenth-century Atlantic basin’ (p.ix). It is a short work in an elegant edition, whose original form as Mellon Distinguished Lectures gives the book an accessibility a longer work might lack. The goal of the book is twofold: firstly, to ‘explicate European and indigenous American interpretations of nature’; and secondly, to argue that in order to ‘understand the environmental history of the sixteenth-century Atlantic basin, scholars must consider the wide range of potentially relevant evidence’ (p.x).Specifically, Peter Mancall analyses a series of visual images and oral histories (through printed versions) which, he argues, have ‘played too scant a role in scholars’ exploration of the initial encounter between peoples’ (p.x).