Reviews of Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human

David Abulafia (University of Cambridge), Times Literary Supplement:
’Fluently written and elegantly produced, this is an original, perceptive and finely researched addition to the literature on the European discovery of mankind.’

Larry Silver (University of Pennsylvania), The Sixteenth-Century Journal:
‘Sometimes a reviewer comes across a book and devoutly wishes that s/he had written it first. This is such a book. Whether the reader engages in cultural history, history of cartography, history of art, or the new wave of early modern global history, this book will hold fresh ideas, synthetic mastery of rapidly expanding literature, and fundamental topicality, even about what defines humanity itself.’

Katharina Piechocki (Harvard University), Global Intellectual History:
‘…a true gem in the history of ideas which opens up new avenues to think about the intricate relationship among ethnography, cartography, history of science, and medicine in a time when the world became globalized for the first time … The book will prove crucial for students and advanced scholars of the early modern period, not only historians, historians of science, ethnologists, and historians of cartography, but also scholars of the Atlantic world, art historians, literary scholars, global historians, and environmental historians.'

Ricardo Padrón (University of Virginia), American Association of Geographers Annual Review of Books:
‘[An] extraordinary and indispensable contribution to the history of how early modern Europeans confronted the challenge of defining what it meant to be human in a rapidly expanding world.’

Shirin A. Khanmohamadi (San Francisco State University), American Historical Review:
‘This exacting study of both European literary and cartographic representations of the New World in the long sixteenth century—two studies in one, really—makes a major scholarly contribution to the fields of early modern cartography and visual culture, the history of ethnography, and New World travel writing. Its wide-ranging and current scholarly bibliography and extensive notes make it especially suited to graduate study and specialists, but any who are interested in the ever-expanding field of early travel and its representation will learn much from its pages.’

Gavin Hollis (New York University), Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies:
‘…at a time of concerted interest in matters of humanism and post-humanism in early modern studies, and the emergence of the Anthropocene as a critical (in all senses of the word) category of analysis that challenges both epistemology and ontology, Davies’ considerable achievement anticipates future projects that reconsider the processes of mapping and codifying natural phenomena “within a longer chronology of attempts to come to terms with the concept of the human … and the implications of understanding ‘human’ as a fluid, subjective category that is inseparable from its environment” ’.

Tom Conley (Harvard University), Imago Mundi:
‘Based on extensive research conducted in a plethora of archives, replete with more than a thousand footnotes sustaining the 300 pages of text, this magnificently documented study builds on the work of Anthony Pagden, Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Mary Baine Campbell, Frank Lestringant and a host other scholars. Sorting through maps in which fantasy and veracity are two sides of the same coin, it informs us, too, about how attraction and repulsion bear on the psyche. No less, with remarkable precision, Davies shows how the beginnings of ethnography are directly related to the growth of early modern cartography.’

Erling Sandmo (University of Oslo / The Norwegian National Library), Somatechnics:
‘…a major contribution to a whole range of fields: cartography, book history, and the histories of travel accounts, and colonialism – to name some of the most obvious…. It is hard to imagine anyone involved in the cultural history of ethnographic difference or in the history of cartography not profiting from [Davies’s] work.’

Michaela Valente (Sapienza Università di Roma), Bruniana & Campanelliana: Ricerche filosofiche e materiali storico-testuali:
'Si tratta di uno studio complesso e ambizioso, solido e accurato per quantità e qualità delle fonti prese in esame e per consapevolezza e rigore critico. Tra le righe, si avverte l’influenza della miglior tradizione del Warburg Institute e la studiosa dichiara i suoi debiti nei confronti della storia culturale e della histoire des mentalités.’

Guido van Meersbergen (Warwick University), Renaissance Quarterly:
'…Renaissance Ethnography presents the most authoritative analysis of the iconography of Amerindian peoples on Renaissance maps to date…. Its original arguments about the role of mapmakers as knowledge makers within the context of colonial expansion and shifting ideas about the human ensure that this book will be of interest not just to historians of cartography, but also to cultural historians, historians of art, and historians of science.'

Robert J. Mayhew (Bristol University), Journal of Historical Geography:
'…a powerful, erudite, and elegant contribution to our knowledge of the interweaving of cartography, colonialism, and cultural encounter in the century and a half after Columbus set sail.'