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Esteban: The African Slave who Explored America

establish his credibility by citing independent sources, such as John Mandeville and eyewitness indigenous accounts. For Davies, Jodocus Hondius the Elder’s interpretation of Ralegh marks the turning point for her argument. Hondius engaged in what Davies terms “visual exegesis.” Showing how maps from 1596 to 1598 had drawn extensively on Ralegh’s descriptions of Guiana, Hondius, who knew that no Dutch voyages to Guiana had corroborated Ralegh’s report, illustrated his 1608 world map with no headless people or Amazons. Furthermore the “ethnographic frieze” format, in which people from different areas would be lined up and, therefore, compared on the periphery of a map, illustrated pamphlet or travel book served to stretch the bonds of what Davies terms the “ethnographic credibility” at the time. It is finally with her examination of cities on maps, that Davies completes her argument. Cities such as Cuzco or Tenochtitlán was described as civilized in an Aristotelian sense in that they had leaders, wealthy classes, armies, trade, and farming. Davies implies that mapmakers of Peru and Mexico did not try to appeal to the sensational images of barbarism through traditional negative imagery; rather, they simply showed human diversity across geographic space. The 1596 De Bry maps, for example, did not focus on locational specificity of peoples, but on their everyday life and costume. Davies calls this a “new epistemic virtue” for maps that stressed universal humanity rather than earlier notions of negative difference and monstrosity. This new humanity, as she shows, was increasingly depicted hierarchically with the personification of the Amerindian usually at the bottom of the cultural chain. However, despite the disparate status of Europeans and Americans, maps like Hondius’ 1608 world map suggested that all people shared a genealogy as descendants of Noah. For Davies, this like the De Bry maps serves to establish a common, although disproportionate sense of humanity. On the whole Davies’s work is a solid success. Her arguments rest firmly on primary texts and images; where her arguments differ from others, such as with Shapin and Shapiro, she offers evidence to defend her position. The narrative is supplemented by the inclusion of many of the maps and illustrations to which she refers. By her own admission, Davies grounds her work in a geographically limited set of sources, but as a means of demonstrating how, during the long sixteenth century, the European intellectual epistemology transitioned from considering the other as monstrous to human, her work is a refreshing contribution to the literature of sixteenth-century intellectual and cultural history.