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"Mancall, Peter C."
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Collecting Across Cultures
In the early modern age more people traveled farther than at any earlier time in human history. Many returned home with stories of distant lands and at least some of the objects they collected during their journeys. And those who did not travel eagerly acquired wondrous materials that arrived from faraway places. Objects traveled various routes-personal, imperial, missionary, or trade-and moved not only across space but also across cultures. Histories of the early modern global culture of collecting have focused for the most part on EuropeanWunderkammern, or \"cabinets of curiosities.\" But the passion for acquiring unfamiliar items rippled across many lands. The court in Java marveled at, collected, and displayed myriad goods brought through its halls. African princes traded captured members of other African groups so they could get the newest kinds of cloth produced in Europe. Native Americans sought colored glass beads made in Europe, often trading them to other indigenous groups. Items changed hands and crossed cultural boundaries frequently, often gaining new and valuable meanings in the process. An object that might have seemed mundane in some cultures could become a target of veneration in another. The fourteen essays inCollecting Across Culturesrepresent work by an international group of historians, art historians, and historians of science. Each author explores a specific aspect of the cross-cultural history of collecting and display from the dawn of the sixteenth century to the early decades of the nineteenth century. As the essays attest, an examination of early modern collecting in cross-cultural contexts sheds light on the creative and complicated ways in which objects in collections served to create knowledge-some factual, some fictional-about distant peoples in an increasingly transnational world.
eBook
Nature and culture in the early modern Atlantic
In the sixteenth-century Atlantic world, nature and culture swirled in people's minds to produce fantastic images. In the South of France, a cloister's painted wooden panels greeted parishioners with vivid depictions of unicorns, dragons, and centaurs, while Mayans in the Yucatan created openings to buildings that resembled a fierce animal's jaws, known to archaeologists as serpent-column portals.In Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic, historian Peter C. Mancall reveals how Europeans and Native Americans thought about a natural world undergoing rapid change in the century following the historic voyages of Christopher Columbus. Through innovative use of oral history and folklore maintained for centuries by Native Americans, as well as original use of spectacular manuscript atlases, paintings that depict on-the-spot European representations of nature, and texts that circulated imperfectly across the ocean, he reveals how the encounter between the old world and the new changed the fate of millions of individuals.This inspired work of Atlantic, European, and American history begins with medieval concepts of nature and ends in an age when the printed book became the primary avenue for the dissemination of scientific information. Throughout the sixteenth century, the borders between the natural world and the supernatural were more porous than modern readers might realize. Native Americans and Europeans alike thought about monsters, spirits, and insects in considerable depth. In Mancall's vivid narrative, the modern world emerged as a result of the myriad encounters between peoples who inhabited the Atlantic basin in this period. The centuries that followed can be comprehended only by exploring how culture in its many forms—stories, paintings, books—shaped human understanding of the natural world.
eBook
Hakluyt’s Promise
Richard Hakluyt the younger, a contemporary of William Shakespeare, advocated the creation of English colonies in the New World at a time when the advantages of this idea were far from self-evident. This book describes in detail the life and times of Hakluyt, a trained minister who became an editor of travel accounts.Hakluyt's Promisedemonstrates his prominent role in the establishment of English America as well as his interests in English opportunities in the East Indies. The volume presents nearly 50 illustrations-many unpublished since the sixteenth century-and offers a fresh view of Hakluyt's milieu and the central concerns of the Elizabethan age.
Though he never traveled farther than Paris, young Hakluyt spent much of the 1580s recording information about the western hemisphere and became an international authority on overseas exploration. The book traces his rise to prominence as a source of information and inspiration for England's policy makers, including the queen, and his advocacy for colonies in Roanoke and Jamestown. Hakluyt's thought was shaped by debates that stretched across Europe, and his interests ranged just as widely, encompassing such topics as peaceful coexistence with Native Americans, the New World as a Protestant Holy Land, and in, his later life, trade with the Spice Islands.
eBook
The Raw and the Cold: Five English Sailors in Sixteenth-Century Nunavut
Historians have long known that the English explorer Martin Frobisher left five men behind on his voyage to Baffin Island in 1576. Those men later vanished from the historical record. But the mystery of their disappearance is only the start of the story. Investigating the texts surrounding Frobisher's three voyages to Nunavut along with other kinds of evidence, such as folklore and oral history, invests the saga of the five men with different meaning. First, microhistorical analysis can reveal the shifting place of the Arctic in English plans for the Western Hemisphere. Second, the differing stories about what happened to the men serve as a reminder that in this part of the world the fate of Europeans depended on maintaining good relations with local peoples. The Inuit knew how to survive the frigid climate of Nunavut, but the English did not. Lacking the kinds of advantages that the English possessed in other sites of encounter, the newcomers redefined their expectations: the North would be a place to harvest resources and perhaps traverse, but not territory that invited settlement. The Inuit remained the masters of the Arctic.
Journal Article
Virginia 1619
Virginia 1619provides an opportunity to reflect on the origins of English colonialism around the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic world. As the essays here demonstrate, Anglo-Americans have been simultaneously experimenting with representative government and struggling with the corrosive legacy of racial thinking for more than four centuries. Virginia, contrary to popular stereotypes, was not the product of thoughtless, greedy, or impatient English colonists. Instead, the emergence of stable English Atlantic colonies reflected the deliberate efforts of an array of actors to establish new societies based on their ideas about commonwealth, commerce, and colonialism. Looking back from 2019, we can understand that what happened on the shores of the Chesapeake four hundred years ago was no accident. Slavery and freedom were born together as migrants and English officials figured out how to make this colony succeed. They did so in the face of rival ventures and while struggling to survive in a dangerous environment. Three hallmarks of English America--self-government, slavery, and native dispossession--took shape as everyone contested the future of empire along the James River in 1619. The contributors are Nicholas Canny, Misha Ewen, Andrew Fitzmaurice, Jack P. Greene, Paul D. Halliday, Alexander B. Haskell, James Horn, Michael J. Jarvis, Peter C. Mancall, Philip D. Morgan, Melissa N. Morris, Paul Musselwhite, James D. Rice, and Lauren Working.
eBook
The Age of Failure
From the 1490s through the 1610s, the English failed more often than they succeeded in their efforts to explore and colonize the Western Hemisphere. But even when travelers did not return, chroniclers told their stories. Taken together, these texts constituted an archive of disappointment. In this essay, I identify the best-known accounts and set them into a historical narrative that unfolded before the English arrived in New Plymouth in 1620.
Journal Article
Thinking with James Bay: Crees, English, and Cold
This article considers a clash of 2 historic ways of understanding human relations with the environment in James Bay, Canada, which stretches from 52° to 55° north latitude: Cree traditional knowledge and the writings of early 17th-century English explorers. The observations and practices of both Natives and newcomers reflected the enduring power of cold and the particular systems of information that emerged in a region where winter posed myriad threats. These different kinds of historical knowledge survive in different media, one oral and the other written. By considering them together, it becomes clear that the most radical environmental shift in the region occurred not with the signing of the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement of 1975, but instead over 300 years earlier. This conclusion suggests reconsideration of the environmental historian Alfred Crosby's notion of “ecological imperialism”, a process understood as the result of the movement of biota, with quick and far-reaching results across temperate zones in the Western Hemisphere (and in select other parts of the Earth). In and around James Bay, the arrival of Europeans—and their recognition that they could survive and extract resources from the region despite the dangers of its winters—initiated long-term environmental changes well before the transference of biota.
Journal Article