New World Encounters

The discovery of the Indies, wrote Francisco López de Gómara in 1552, was "the greatest event since the creation of the world, excepting the Incarnation and Death of Him who created it." Five centuries have not diminished either the overwhelming importance or the strangeness of the early encounter between Europeans and American peoples. This collection of essays, encompassing history, literary criticism, art history, and anthropology, offers a fresh and innovative approach to the momentous encounter.

"Refreshing and gratifying. . . . The epics of the Pueblos' resistance, the Aztec poetry before and after the conquest, and the ritual of toqui oncoy show the complexity of the means for survival developed throughout the Americas, from New Mexico to the Andes."—Jaime Concha, University of California, San Diego

"Many of these essays form the cutting edge of scholarship on the expansion of Europe and its cultural consequences. Visual evidence, much of it unfamiliar, is deftly integrated into the textual analysis. . . . This work is so solid, so elegantly presented, and at the same time so innovative that the book should attract considerable attention and remain in use for a long time."—Anthony Grafton, author of Defenders of the Text

John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, editor of The Norton Shakespeare, and prizewinning author of academic books including Hamlet in Purgatory, Stephen Greenblatt garnered a 2004 National Book Award nomination for his eye-opening look at the life and career of William Shakespeare.