Native Americans in Europe (Atlantic History)

Introduction

The scope of Native American presence in early modern Europe from 1492 to c. 1800 CE is not well understood. Research on cultural encounters between indigenous peoples of the Americas (variously referred to as “Native Americans,” “Indians,” or “Amerindians”) and Europeans in the colonial and borderland arenas of the Americas ranges from analyses of European discovery and colonization to explorations of accommodation, resistance, and cross-cultural exchange. In contrast, Native American–European cultural exchanges in European lands remain in relative obscurity. Native Americans journeyed to Europe as visiting dignitaries, willing or unwilling travelers, and slaves. They were most frequently sighted in European states engaged in colonial projects: Portugal, Spain, France, the Low Countries, and England. Particularly during the first century of encounter, many did not survive their exposure to the diseases and living conditions of Europe and died before they could return to the Americas. Archival traces reveal that an unknown number remained in Europe, establishing lives and families. In contrast to the paucity of scholarship on the lived presence or social and cultural impacts of Native Americans in Europe, studies of the visual and textual representations of Native Americans in Europe have proliferated. Ideas and information about the “New World” circulated in forms ranging from eyewitness accounts to fantasies of the savage altern. This new knowledge contributed to the reshaping of ethnography, visual iconographies, natural history and medicine, and ideas of history, cultural relativism, civilization, savagery, and the exotic in early modern Europe.

General Overviews

Elliott 1970 framed a major research question of “Native Americans in Europe”: knowledge and knowledge production. Timely interdisciplinary conference volumes brought together leading scholars’ responses to questions of reception and impacts. Chiappelli 1976 exerted significant influence in shaping subsequent research and continues to serve as an encyclopedic starting point for scholars. Kupperman 1995 presented the state of the field in many research areas. The exploratory collection of essays in Feest 1987 focused on Native American visitors to Europe. Treuil, et al. 2004 highlighted archival possibilities for 18th-century France. Well-researched and reliable surveys of the Native American presence in Europe are Dickason 1984 for pre-18th-century France and Vaughan 2006 for Britain and 16th-century Europe more generally.

Chiappelli, Fredi. First Images of America. 2 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.
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An important collection of over fifty essays, many by scholars whose work has shaped their fields. Encompassed topics ranging from the formation of knowledge in areas of geography, ethnography, politics, literature, and theology to demographic trends and material exchanges. These works sought to evaluate the influence of Europeans’ encounter with the Americas on European culture and thought.
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Dickason, Olive Patricia. The Myth of the Savage and the Beginnings of French Colonialism in the Americas. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1984.
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The chapter “Amerindians in Europe” summarizes the Native American visitors, students, and prisoners of wars or otherwise unfree people from 1505 to c. 1690 (and, in addition, one traveler in 1740), whose presence in France was recorded.
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Elliott, J. H. The Old World and the New, 1492–1650. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1970.
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This influential essay evaluated the intellectual consequences of the New World’s discovery on the Old World, arguing for a delayed or “blunted” ideational impact.
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Feest, Christian, ed. Indians and Europe: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays. Aachen, West Germany: Edition Herodot/Raader-Verlag, 1987.
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Sought to stimulate further research on European encounters with and views of Native Americans. The essays discussing the pre-1800 period are grounded in visual materials available in European libraries and archives and include attention to North American Indians.
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Kupperman, Karen Ordahl, ed. America in European Consciousness, 1493–1750. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
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Many of the essays, drawn from a 1991 conference organized by the John Carter Brown Library, are richly researched evaluations of the state of the field. Influential essays include Sabine MacCormack’s essay on comparisons between Greco-Roman and Amerindian paganism and J. H. Elliott’s own reassessment of Elliott 1970.
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Treuil, Aline, Valérie Denier, and Dominique Guillemet. “Des Amérindiens en Centre-Ouest aux XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles.” In Champlain ou les portes du Nouveau Monde: Cinq siècles d’échanges entre le Centre-Ouest français et l’Amérique du Nord. Edited by Mickaël Augeron and Dominique Guillemet, 157–159. La Crèche, France: Geste, 2004.
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Presents archival traces, primarily in parish registers, of Native North Americans in 18th-century western France.
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Vaughan, Alden T. Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain, 1500–1776. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
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A well-researched introduction to Native American sojourners in Europe, this survey discusses 16th-century visitors to Portugal, Spain, France, and England before focusing on travelers, slaves, and diplomatic envoys to Britain during the 17th and 18th centuries. Emphasizes the ambiguous status and reception of Inuits, Squanto and other Wampanoags, Pocahontas and other Powhatans, additional early visitors, and Mohegan preacher Samson Occom. Also highlights the 18th-century phenomenon of diplomatic delegations.
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Bibliographies and Reference Works

Alden 1980–1996 is the most complete bibliography of printed material about Native Americans in the early modern era. John Carter Brown Library Online is becoming increasingly useful.

Alden, John, with Dennis C. Landis, eds. European Americana: 1493–1750. 6 vols. New York: Readex, 1980–1996.
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This indispensable bibliography of pre-1750 European printed material on the subject of the Americas replaces earlier bibliographies.
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John Carter Brown Library Online.
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With a rich and varied collection of printed and manuscript materials on the Americas dated prior to c. 1825, the John Carter Brown Library has created substantial online visual image collections and digitized difficult-to-access books in a growing range of categories.
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Case Studies

Native American travelers to Europe, whether willing or unwilling, have been the subject of surveys in Dickason 1984 and Vaughan 2006 (see General Overviews). For France, Anderson 2007 examines the Innu Pierre-Anthoine Pastedechouan’s religious education and Havard 2010 (see Slavery and Labor) the Meskwaki prisoner Coulipa. Delegations representing indigenous polities have also been the subject of focused studies. For the 1710 Iroquois delegation to Britain, Bond 1952 collected the printed sources and Garratt 1985 the visual sources (in Visual Representations). Native American frontier concerns and negotiations are the focus of Hinderaker’s (Hinderaker 2010) discussion of the 1710 delegation and Sweet’s (Sweet 2004) examination of the 1732 Creek delegation. Delegations to France are treated more sparingly: Hamy 1908 (see Spectacle and Musical Performance) published the print material covering the 1613 Tupinamba visit. The 1725 delegation of Illinois, Missouri, Osage, and Oto chiefs was the subject of a contemporary news bulletin reproduced in Ellis and Steen 1974 and stood as the culminating diplomatic event of Bourgmont’s career in Norall 1988. Tupi delegations to the Low Countries are examined in Meuwese 2006. For Spain, Cline 1969 discusses the 1529 envoys from the former Aztec Empire, and Johnson 2011 (see Materiality) describes several additional 16th-century embassies.

Anderson, Emma. The Betrayal of Faith: The Tragic Journey of a Colonial Native Convert. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
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Narrates the early-17th-century life of Pierre-Anthoine Pastedechouan who left his Innu people for five years of “assimilationist” religious study in France; upon returning to New France, he inhabited a liminal space between French and Innu cultures until his early death.
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Bond, Richmond Pugh. Queen Anne’s American Kings. Oxford: Clarendon, 1952.
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Assembles much contemporary source material, including lengthy transcriptions of printed material, to explicate the visit of the four “Iroquois kings” to Britain. Includes black-and-white reproductions of John Verelst’s portraits of the three Mohawks (Hendrick Tejonikoarawa, Brant Squainquaragton, and John Onigoheriago) and the Mahican Etowaucum.
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Cline, Howard F. “Hernando Cortes and the Aztec Indians in Spain.” Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 26 (1969): 70–90.
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Details the group of Aztec nobles who accompanied Hernán Cortés to Castile in 1529 to swear fealty to Emperor Charles V.
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Ellis, Richard N., and Charlie R. Steen, ed. “An Indian Delegation in France, 1725.” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 67 (1974): 385–405.
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Primarily a translation of a Mercure de France article describing the delegation of Illinois, Missouri, Osage, and Oto chiefs to the French court of Louis XV in 1725.
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Hinderaker, Eric. The Two Hendricks: Unraveling a Mohawk Mystery. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
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Provides the Mohawk context for Hendrick Tejonihokarawa’s engagement with the British, including his 1710 visit to London, and disentangles his identity from that of Hendrick Peters Theyanoguin.
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Meuwese, Mark. “Powerless yet Resourceful: Brazilian Indians as Political Refugees in the Dutch Republic, 1654–1657.” In The Low Countries: Crossroads of Cultures. Edited by T. J. Broos, M. Bruyn Lacy, and T. F. Shannon, 83–92. Münster, Germany: Nodus, 2006.
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Documents the treatment of Tupi-speaking Indians allied with the W.I.C. after the Dutch were expelled from Brazil in 1654.
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Norall, Frank. Bourgmont, Explorer of the Missouri, 1698–1725. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988.
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Includes a chapter on the visit of Illinois, Missouri, Osage, and Oto chiefs to France in 1725, which was organized by Étienne de Véniard de Bourgmont. Also includes mention of Bourgmont’s Paduca slave (baptized Marie Angélique) who remained in France and established a family.
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Sweet, Julie Anne. Negotiating for Georgia: British-Creek Relations in the Trustee Era, 1733–1752. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2004.
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Examines the Creek-centered colonial context for Creek leader Tomochichi’s diplomatic trip to London in 1734.
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Elite Emigration

A few elite Nahua and Inca, as well as their mestizo children, entered into 16th-century Spanish society. Rojas 1994, Álvarez Nogal 1994, and Pelegrí Pedrosa 2001 drew on older studies and archival research for the Moctezuma family branches’ varying degrees of integration. Miró Quesada Sosa 1971 and Varner 1968 are two biographies of another elite mestizo, El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, whose major work, the Comentarios reales de los Incas, is assessed in Zamora 1988.

Álvarez Nogal, Carlos. “El Conde de Moctezuma en el Reino de Granada.” In El Reino de Granada y el Nuevo Mundo: V Congreso Internacional de Historia de América, mayo de 1992. Vol. 2, 105–116. Granada, Spain: Diputación Provincial de Granada, 1994.
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Discusses the descendants of Moctezuma’s son Diego Luis Ihuiltemoctzin and their treatment in Spain by the crown.
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Miró Quesada Sosa, Aurelio. El Inca Garcilaso, y otros estudios garcilasistas. Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, 1971.
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A comprehensive biography of the mestizo Gómez Suárez de Figueroa, who traveled to Spain, changed his name to El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, and wrote La Florida del Inca (1605) and Comentarios reales de los Incas (1609 and 1617).
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Pelegrí Pedrosa, Luis Vicente. “El linaje Moctezuma. Una empresa familiar interoceánica.” In Ciencia, economía y política en Hispanoamérica colonial. Co-ordinated by Antonio Gutiérrez Escudero. 111–114. Seville: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2001.
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Focuses on the children of Moctezuma’s daughter Isabel Tecuichpotzin and Juan Cano Saavedra, as well as their integration into Spanish society.
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Rojas, José Luis de. “De México a Granada: Descendientes de Moctezuma en España.” In El Reino de Granada y el Nuevo Mundo: V Congreso Internacional de Historia de América, mayo de 1992. Vol. 2, 117–134. Granada, Spain: Diputación Provincial de Granada, 1994.
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Surveys the documentary evidence for all of Moctezuma’s recorded surviving children.
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Varner, John Grier. El Inca, the Life and Times of Garcilaso de la Vega. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968.
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This English-language biography of El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega includes attention to the context of his La Florida del Inca (1605).
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Zamora, Margarita. Language, authority and indigenous history in the Comentarios reales de los Incas. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511519390Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Explores El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s use of Renaissance humanism philology and strategies of cultural translation in his history of the Inca Empire and Spanish conquest, Comentarios reales de los Incas (1609 and 1617).
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Slavery and Labor

Traces of enslaved Native Americans living in Europe are scattered in Vaughan 2006 and Dickason 1984 (see General Overviews), Norrall 1988 (see Case Studies), and addressed in Forbes 1993. Forced labor is discussed in Havard 2010. The presence of Indian slaves and Indian labor in 16th-century Spain has been substantively documented. Franco Silva 1992 focuses on slavery in Andalusia, and Mira Caballos 2000 identifies both enslaved and free Native Americans in Castile.

Forbes, Jack D. Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.
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Includes a chapter detailing the presence of Native American slaves in Europe, including examples from Portugal, Aragon, the Low Countries, and France.
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Franco Silva, Alfonso. La Esclavitud en Andalucia: 1450–1550. Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1992.
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Provides extensive information on Indian slaves in Andalucia.
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Havard, Gilles. “Un Américain à Rochefort (1731–1732): Le destin de Coulipa, Indien renard.” In Les étrangers dans les villes-ports atlantiques: Expériences françaises et allemandes, Xve – XIXe siècle. Edited by M. Augeron, P. Even, and B. Schmidt, 143–155. Paris: Indes savantes, 2010.
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Focusing on the case of the Meskwaki (Renard) Indian Coulipa, this essay examines the French colonial strategies toward enemy Native American peoples, including assigning prisoners of war to galley service.
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Mira Caballos, Esteban. Indios y Mestizos Americanos en la España del Siglo XVI. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2000.
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Synthesizes previous scholarship and new research to offer a qualitative and quantitative assessment of the roles and numbers of Indians in Castile in the 16th century.
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Materiality

An increasing emphasis on the importance of materiality in cultural production has highlighted the transatlantic flow of Native American material objects to Europe. Material objects shaped European understandings in a variety of arenas: for scientific knowledge see Barrera-Osorio 2006; for collections see Feest 1993; for desacralizing and commodifying psychotropics see Norton 2008; and for cultural evaluation and assessments of difference through objects and Native American people see Bickham 2005 and Johnson 2011.

Barrera-Osorio, Antonio. Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2006.
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Traces the role of empirical observation, particularly involving materials and data from the Americas, in the development of scientific thought in the 16th-century Spanish world.
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Bickham, Troy O. Savages Within the Empire: Representations of American Indians in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
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Examines of representations of North American Indian visitors to Britain, their treatment in the popular press, and the incorporation of their artifacts in collections. In the wake of the Seven Years’ War, these North American Indians were increasingly understood as savage or primitive.
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Feest, Christian. “European Collecting of American Indian Artefacts and Art.” Journal of the History of Collections 5 (1993): 1–11.
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Introduces important European collections, beginning with the 16th-century Kunst- and Wunderkammer (i.e., cabinets of curiosity) collections and concluding with the paradigm shift represented by Enlightenment-era aesthetic descriptions and collections.
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Johnson, Carina L. Cultural Hierarchy in Sixteenth-Century Europe: The Ottomans and Mexicans. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
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Draws on early print representations and European cultural practices involving Mexica envoys and treasure to delineate the breakdown of Renaissance cultural relativism and the emergence of ideas of civilizational hierarchy in 16th-century Habsburg Europe.
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Norton, Marcy. Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008.
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This study of cultural flows across the Atlantic from the Americas to Europe begins with the pre-1492 Native American ceremonial uses of chocolate and tobacco, and traces these goods’ transformations in colonial and then Spanish society as they became desacralized commodities.
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Spectacle and Musical Performance

The scholarship on spectacles and musical performances continues to be shaped by national histories and aesthetic traditions. For French spectacle, McGowan 1968 emphasizes Renaissance forms and Wintroub 2006 transatlantic enterprisers in their discussions of the same 1550 royal entry. Hamy 1908 provides material on a 1613 Tupinamba baptism ceremony. Representations of the Native American in French ballet are addressed in Christout 2005 for the 17th-century and Meglin 2000 for the 18th- and early-19th-century. Sommer-Mathis, et al. 1992 surveys Spanish spectacle and theater. Bloechle 2008 considers the English negative cultural evaluation of ecstatic vocality before offering an experimental comparison of English and French spectacles that link their respective theatrical roles for Indian characters to their differing colonial experiences and strategies.

Bloechle, Olivia A. Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
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The first half explores the English encounter with ecstatic vocality among Quakers and northeastern American Woodlands people. The second half compares “Indian” roles in English and French spectacles: at the Stuart court, masques contrasted orderly Native Americans with the anti-masque’s demonic disorderly ones. The French incorporated Indians as assimilatable subjects in Jean-Baptiste Lully’s 1685 ballet Le Temple de la paix and Jean-Philippe Rameau’s operas of the 1720s and 1730s.
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Christout, Marie-Françoise. Le Ballet de Cour de Louis XIV, 1643–1672: Mises en scène. Paris: Picard and Centre national de la danse, 2005.
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Contextualizes “Indian” roles in 17th-century French ballet within a broad discussion of themes and representational strategies. This revision incorporates relevant scholarship from the decades since the 1967 edition and adds color plates of costumes and scene sketches, appendices with ballet details, and a chronological index.
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Hamy, E. -T. “Les Indiens de Rasilly peints par Du Viert et gravés par Firens et Gaultier (1613). Étude iconographique et ethnographique.” Journal de la Société des Américanistes. 5 (1908): 20–52.
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The visual and textual record of six Tupinamba visiting Paris in 1613, including their baptism ceremony.
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McGowan, Margaret M. “Form and Themes in Henri II’s Entry into Rouen.” Renaissance Drama 1 (1968): 199–251.
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Explication of the 1550 royal entry into Rouen, which included, among its Renaissance forms, a mock battle between Native Americans and Frenchmen posing as the Tupinamba and Tobajaro of Brazil.
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Meglin, Joellen A. “‘Sauvages, Sex Roles, and Semiotics’: Representations of Native Americans in the French Ballet, 1736–1837, Part One: The Eighteenth Century.” Dance Chronicle 23.2 (2000): 87–132.
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Discusses 18th- and early-19th-century works by Jean-Philippe Rameau, Maximilien Gardel, Louis Henry, Louis Milon, and Antonio Guerra that highlighted Indian characters, and the ethnographic and literary texts that helped shape the balletic presentation of the noble savage.
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Sommer-Mathis, Andrea, Teresa Chaves Montoya, Christopher F. Laferl, and Friedrich Polleross. El Teatro Descubre América: Fiestas y teatro en la Casa de Austria (1492–1700). Madrid: MAPFRE, 1992.
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Surveys the figure of the Indian in 16th- and 17th-century Spanish theater and court spectacles.
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Wintroub, Michael. A Savage Mirror: Power, Identity, and Knowledge in Early Modern France. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.
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Reads the 1550 Rouen royal entry’s mock battle between Tupinamba and Tobajaro Brazilians as the effort of the civic elite of Rouen, themselves heavily engaged in transatlantic trade, to redefine their relationship with King Henri II.
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Visual Representations

Honour 1975a and Honour 1975b are foundational surveys of the visual representation of America. Subsequent studies have adopted more narrow approaches, largely within existing geographic conventions of European art. Mason 1998 provides an eclectic interpretation of the exotic’s production in northern humanist art. For 18th-century British art, Garratt 1985 surveys the Native North American portrait, Pratt 2005 the Indian as historical actor, and Tobin 1999 the hybrid portrait in a comparative framework of British imperialism. Quilley and Kriz 2003 turns to the question of racialization in visual art.

Garratt, John G., and Bruce Robertson. The Four Indian Kings. Ottawa: Public Archives Canada, 1985.
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This bilingual (English and French) work catalogues the pamphlets detailing the 1710 visit of four Iroquois sachems to Britain. It includes color reproductions of the John Verelst portraits of the four “kings”: Hendrick Tejonikoarawa, Brant Squainquaragton, John Onigoheriago (all three Mohawk), and Etowaucum (Mahican), as well as visual representations of other Native Americans from 1580s through the mid-19th century.
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Honour, Hugh. The New Golden Land: European Images of America from the Discoveries to the Present Time. New York: Pantheon, 1975a.
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A fundamental reference written in conjunction with the 1976 exhibition “The European Vision of America.” The geographic breadth (focusing on seaboard states Portugal, England, the Netherlands, and France), depth in genre (ranging from ethnographic to imaginary), and diversity of media make this a valuable introduction to European visual representations of the Americas.
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Honour, Hugh. The European Vision of America. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1975b.
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This catalogue of a bicentennial exhibition is an important complement to The New Golden Land. It focuses more comprehensively on visual representations of indigenous peoples and includes rich bibliographic notes providing entry points into earlier art-historical scholarship.
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Mason, Peter. Infelicities: Representations of the Exotic. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
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Examines images, including paintings by Dutch artists Jan Mostaert and Albert Eckhout, and artifact collections to explore the intersection of the ethnographic and the exotic in northern humanism.
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Pratt, Stephanie. American Indians in British Art, 1700–1840. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005.
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Argues for a highly textured reading of Indians in 18th- and early-19th-century British art. Diplomatic portraits, Benjamin West’s historical paintings, and the emergence of the “dying Indian” trope delineate the rise and decline of Indians as historically specific active agents.
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Quilley, Geoff, and Kay Dian Kriz. An Economy of Colour: Visual culture and the Atlantic World, 1660–1830. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2003.
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Considers the complex processes of racialization in the Atlantic. Essays by Roxann Wheeler and Stephanie Pratt discuss British representations of cultural hybridity and designations of Native American skin color.
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Tobin, Beth Fowkes. Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.
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In a comparative study of paintings from British North America, the West Indies, and India, Tobin argues that late-18th-century portraits of Mohawk and British men demonstrate forms of hybridity and mimicry that reflect constructive exchange for Mohawk warrior Joseph Brant/Theyandanegea and, for British soldiers, destruction of Native American culture.
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Individual Artists

Studies of individual artists have emphasized their works’ ethnographic and (for material goods) natural historical qualities. Weiditz 1927 provides a comparative look at Mexicans amid Africans, Moriscos, and other peoples from early-16th-century Spain and the Holy Roman Empire. Hulton and Quinn 1964, Hulton 1984, and Hulton 1977 examine Protestants John White and Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues’s North American images, which would be reworked in the DeBry Great Voyages series (1590–1634). Brienen 2006 examines Albert Eckhout’s portraits and natural history paintings.

Brienen, Rebecca Parker. Visions of Savage Paradise: Albert Eckhout, Court Painter in Colonial Dutch Brazil. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006.
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Offers a brief biography of Albert Eckhout and examines the paintings and drawings of Tapuya, Tupinamba, and other colonial subjects stemming from his 1636–1644 visit to Brazil with Count Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen.
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Hulton, Paul, and D. B. Quinn, eds. The American Drawings of John White, 1577–1590. London: British Museum, 1964.
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This two-volume edition of John White’s original 1585 Virginia drawings, as well as copied engravings and drawings, is relatively difficult to access. The scholarly discussions presented in the volume of essays are significantly condensed in Hulton 1984.
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Hulton, Paul. America 1585: The Complete Drawings of John White. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.
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Widely available, this edition includes all of John White’s drawings of Algonquians: seventy-seven color plates of his originals and 102 black-and-white figures of copied engravings and drawings from his trip to Virginia with Walter Raleigh in 1585.
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Hulton, Paul. The Work of Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, a Huguenot Artist in France, Florida and England. London: British Museum, 1977.
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This survey includes Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues’s original watercolors, as well as derivative prints (Theodor de Bry’s America Part II, 1591) and copies (Crispin de Passe’s Hortus Floridus, 1614). The work dates to his participation in the 1564–1565 Florida expedition of Laudonnière among the Timucua.
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Weiditz, Christoph. Das Trachtenbuch des Christoph Weiditz: Von seinen Reisen nach Spanien (1529) und den Niederlanden (1531/1532): Nach der in der Bibliothek des Germanischen Nationalmuseums zu Nurnberg aufbewahrten Handschrift. Edited by Theodor Hampe. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1927.
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Primarily a reproduction of Weiditz’s costume book, which depicts the Mexicans that he encountered on his travels to Iberia in 1529 and the Netherlands in 1531–1532. The modern commentary is trilingual: German, English, and Spanish.
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Graphic Art

The medium of print highlights issues of production and reproduction in the visual representation of Native American figures and cultures, as in L’Entrée 1970. Leitch 2010 explores the earliest print images of East and West Indians at the beginning of the 16th century. Bucher 1981 and Gaudio 2008 offer differing interpretations of the de Bry Great Voyage (1590–1634) series engravings.

Bucher, Bernadette. Icon and Conquest: A Structural Analysis of the Illustrations of de Bry’s Great Voyages. Translated by Basia Miller Gulati. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
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First appearing as La sauvage aux seins pendants (1977), Bucher’s work is divided into two parts. The first introduces Theodor de Bry and his editorial role in producing the Great Voyages series. The second section performs a structural analysis, decoding the signs of cultural encounters through the trope of the Indian woman with sagging breasts.
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Gaudio, Michael. Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
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Countering Bucher 1981 and its structural analysis of the de Bry engravings, Gaudio considers the de Bry engravings’ iconographic mediation of Native American culture through the representation of writing, magic symbolized by smoke, and idolatry. These engravings’ utilization in subsequent centuries is also addressed.
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Leitch, Stephanie. Mapping Ethnography in Early Modern Germany: New Worlds in Print Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
DOI: 10.1057/9780230112988Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Hans Burgkmair’s prints from 1508, defined here as ethnographic in content and structure, are the pivot-point in this study of early German prints depicting peoples in India and the Americas. With careful attention to print technology and iconography, Leitch also explores the complex and fluid meanings of reworked wild men, Jorg Breu’s illustrations of Ludovico di Varthema’s text in 1515, and the limit of ethnography presented by scenes of cannibalism.
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McGowan, Margaret, ed. L’Entrée de Henri II [i.e. Deux] à Rouen. New York: Johnson Reprint, 1970.
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Facsimile reproduction of a 1550 pamphlet describing the royal entry of Henri II to Rouen, includes a woodcut depicting the staged Brazilian Indian battle. See McGowan 1968 and Wintroub 2006 in Spectacle and Musical Performance.
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Textual Representations

European literary and other textual representations of Native Americans have been analyzed to gain insights into European mentalities and tropes, as well as for evidence of the consequences of empirical experience. Important studies are Hulme 1986 on the Caribbean savage, Lestringant 1997 on the cannibal, Greenblatt 1991 on wonder and encounter, Cañizares-Esguerra 2006 on the hemispheric perceptions of the devil, and Schmidt 2001 on the Dutch promotion of the Spanish Black Legend through the treatment of the Indians in Spanish America.

Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge. Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550–1700. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.
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Argues for a hemispheric understanding of the “satanic epic” as a trope generated in Iberian Catholic texts and adopted by English Puritan authors.
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Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226306575.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This widely cited work on European representations of the New World as forms of mimetic circulation, focusing on acts of possession, cross-cultural communication, and the role of cultural go-betweens in early encounters.
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Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797. London: Methuen, 1986.
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Traces the evolution of the Caribbean savage into noble Arawak and ignoble Carib and through the early modern English stories of the Tempest, the adventurer John Smith, Robinson Crusoe, and the couple Inkle and Yarico. This literary analysis is paired with a discussion of changing British-Carib political and territorial relations through the end of the Second Carib War in 1797.
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Lestringant, Frank. Cannibals: The Discovery and Representation of the Cannibal from Columbus to Jules Verne. Translated by Rosemary Morris. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
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First appeared in French as Le Cannibale: Grandeur et Décadence in 1994. Michel de Montaigne’s 1562 essay “Of Cannibals” and Théodore Géricault’s 1818–1819 painting “The Shipwreck of the Medusa” serve as bookends for the evolving representations of cannibals who act out of honor or necessity: from their first appearance in Columbus through important French ethnographic and literary authors, including François Rabelais, Catholic André Thevet, Protestant Jean de Léry, and Cornélius de Pauw.
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Schmidt, Benjamin. Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
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Addresses the neglect of cultural production about the Americas in the Low Countries by considering the reception of ideas about the New World. Emphasizes Dutch propagandists’ efforts to fuel critiques of Spanish colonialism and support the Dutch 17th-century Brazilian colony.
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Native Central and South American Societies in European Thought

Early modern Europeans’ efforts to understand and comparatively evaluate Native American societies and histories have often been grouped into Renaissance and Enlightenment eras. Keen 1971 offered an introduction to the copious works of ethnography and history about the Aztec produced from the 16th through the 20th century in Europe and the Americas. Pagden 1982 focused on Spanish thinkers in his discussion of 16th-century European cultural evaluations of Native Americans. Mignolo 1995 charted European repudiations of indigenous texts to trace the rise of a denigrating Occidentalism. Cañizares-Esguerra 2001 responded with a bifurcated reading of Enlightenment-era peninsular Spanish practitioners of history and Spanish Creole history of the Americas. As investigation turns to racialization, Seth 2010 locates the emergence of race in 19th-century concepts of embodied difference.

Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge. How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001.
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In part responding to Mignolo 1995, this study of 18th-century thought argues that patriotic Spanish and Creole Spanish American thinkers repudiated Enlightenment principles of historical evidence and social evolution. Epistemologies and histories that embraced 16th-century Spanish and Native American sources were particularly important in this repudiation.
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Keen, Benjamin. The Aztec Image in Western Thought. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1971.
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An encyclopedic tour of European and American treatments of Mexica culture from the 16th through the early 20th centuries.
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Mignolo, Walter. The Darker Side of the Renaissance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.
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A complex postcolonial evaluation of the early modern European engagement with and rejection of Native American writing systems, categories of knowledge and historical memories, and spatiality as fundamental to Occidentalism as a form of Eurocentrism. It primarily considers Renaissance- and Enlightenment-era texts produced in the Spanish Empire and Italy.
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Pagden, Anthony. The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
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Locates the emergence of comparative ethnology in the works of Bartholomé de las Casas and José de Acosta as responses to colonial experience in 16th-century Spanish America.
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Seth, Vanita. Europe’s Indians: Producing Racial Difference, 1500–1900. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
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Structuring her analysis through Foucauldian epistemes of the Renaissance, Classical, and 19th-century eras, Seth traces the production of self, individual, difference, and (finally in the 19th century) the racialized body through European engagements with ideas of peoples from the Americas and India.
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Native North American Societies and the 18th Century

Representations of 18th-century Native North Americans are heavily inflected by the British imperial experience, with the Seven Years’ War shaping British interpretations of Indian violence and savagery and the American Revolution disrupting British-Indian shared political interests. Bissell 1925 surveyed much of the material, with Colley 2002 providing a comparative imperial perspective and Fulford 2006 directing attention to Native American authorial responses. Sayre 1997 provides the French precursors to these British cultural valuations and Liebsohn 1998 offers a post-American Revolution Continental European recuperation of the noble Indian trope.

Bissell, Benjamin. The American Indian in English Literature of the Eighteenth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1925.
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A general introduction of English literary texts organized by trope and genre.
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Colley, Linda. Captives. New York: Pantheon, 2002.
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Places the British North American experience of captivity within the broader British Empire, arguing that popular British attention to the phenomenon of captivity and the trope of the frightening and violent Native American was catalyzed by the Seven Years’ War and illustrated by shifting presentation of North American envoys.
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Fulford, Tim. Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature, and Transatlantic Culture 1756–1830. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
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Examines British production of the “Romantic” Indian in the era after the Seven Years’ War and the critical responses to the trope produced by Native American and mixed-race authors.
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Liebsohn, Harry. Aristocratic Encounters: European Travelers and North American Indians. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
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Focuses on aristocratic travelers François-René Chateaubriand, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Maximilian von Wied’s reframing of concepts of aristocracy in an era of political revolution through their romantic engagements with “noble” Native Americans.
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Sayre, Gordon. Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
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After comparing early English and French “explorer-ethnographer” texts, this study focuses on 17th- and 18th-century French authors who wrote about the peoples of the North American eastern woodlands. The cultural observations of Joseph-François Lafitau and Baron de Lahontan, as well as the social life of the beaver, illuminate French understandings of the sauvage as distinct from the European. Includes a biographical dictionary of primarily English and French explorer-ethnographers of colonial North America.
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Native American Bodies and Science

Native American bodies had multiple roles in the production of early modern European science. Barrera-Osorio 2006 (see Materiality) and Schiebinger and Swann 2005 discuss Native American participation in the transfer of knowledge about the natural world in the Americas to Europe. Europeans also made Native American bodies the objects of their attention. Sayre 1997 (see Native North American Societies and the 18th Century) and Chaplin 2001 delineate trajectories for the developing European understanding of the Native American body as different from that of the European body, while Quilley and Kriz 2003 (see Visual Representations) and Seth 2010 (see Native Central and South American Societies in European Thought) seek to trace the development of racial categories.

Chaplin, Joyce. Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500–1676. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
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Examines the intersection of scientific and imperial projects through English discussions of Native American bodies and technologies in comparison with English ones. Argues for a growing perception of cultural difference, located in the body, during the second half of the 17th century.
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Schiebinger, Londa, and Claudia Swan, eds. Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.
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Innovative collection of articles that considers the American and East Indian colonial contexts and indigenous contributions to early modern botany. Essays by Daniela Bleichmar and Londa Schiebinger explore “bioprospecting” in the Americas.