Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. The Clarendon Lectures and the Carpenter Lectures, 1988 (Clarendon Paperbacks)

Stephen J. Greenblatt

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0198122667 ISBN 13: 9780198122661

Publisher: Clarendon Press, 1997

'And there I found very many islands filled with people innumerable, and of all of them I have taken possession for their highnesses, by proclamation made and with the royal standard unfurled, and no one contradicted me' - Christopher Columbus Marvelous Possessions is a study of the ways in which Europeans of the late Middle Ages and the early modern period represented non-European peoples and took possession of their lands, in particular the New World. In a series of innovative readings of travel narratives, judicial documents, and official reports, Greenblatt shows that the experience of the marvelous, central to both art and philosophy, was cunningly yoked by Columbus and others to the service of colonial appropriation. He argues that the traditional symbolic actions and legal rituals through which European sovereignty was asserted were strained to breaking-point by the unprecedented nature of the discovery of the New World. But the book also shows that the experience of the marvelous is not necessarily an agent of empire: in writers as different as Herodotus, Jean de Lery, and Montaigne - and notably in Mandeville's Travels, the most popular travel book of the Middle Ages - wonder is the sign of a remarkably tolerant recognition of cultural difference.

Review:

his writing teems with apt insight (Financial Times)

a subtle, witty analysis of the "possessive madness" and sleight of mind by which Christian capitalism turned marvel into mandate. (Observer)

"Marvelous Possessions is a marvellous book. It is also a compelling and powerful one. Nothing so original has ever been written on European responses to "the wonder of the New World"."Times Literary Supplement

About the Author:

An extremely important literary critic, Stephen Greenblatt is the author of Shakespearean Negotiations (OUP/University of California Press, 1988; Clarendon Paperbacks, 1990), which won the 1988 James Russell Lowell Prize awarded by the Modern Language Association of America. His other works include Learning to Curse (Routledge, 1990), Renaissance Self-Fashioning (University of Chicago Press, 1980), and Sir Walter Ralegh (Yale UP, 1973).