European Encounters with the New World (Paper): From Renaissance to Romanticism (Revised) - Softcover

Pagden, Anthony

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0300059507 ISBN 13: 9780300059502

Publisher: Yale University Press, 1994

Synopsis

For more than three centuries after Columbus' voyages to America, Europeans pondered how the Old World's encounters with the New World affected European sensibilities and intellectual horizons. In this book Anthony Pagden examines some of the varied ways in which Europeans interpreted these encounters with America.

About this title

Synopsis

For more than three centuries after Columbus' voyages to America, Europeans pondered how the Old World's encounters with the New World affected European sensibilities and intellectual horizons. In this book Anthony Pagden examines some of the varied ways in which Europeans interpreted these encounters with America. Pagden explores the strategies used by Columbus and the early chroniclers of America to describe a continent and its inhabitants so unfamiliar to Europeans. He looks at how, in the 17th and 18th centuries, Europeans reacted in different ways to these descriptions. Some, like the Prussian explorer and naturalist, Alexander von Humboldt, declared that scientific understanding before the ocean voyages had advanced by slow steps and that encounters with America had invigorated Europeans, while others argued against the process of colonization and acculturation in the Americas. In an exploration of these and other responses, Pagden throws light on the intellectual consequences of Europe's encounter with the Americas.

About the Author

Anthony Pagden is Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Political Science and History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has been a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford; Senior Research Fellow of the Warburg Institute, London; Professor of History at the European University Institute, Florence; University Reader in Intellectual History and Fellow of King's College, Cambridge; and the Harry C. Black Professor of History at The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of more than a dozen books, many of which have been translated into a number of European and Asian languages. His most recent publications include Worlds and War: The 2,500-Year Struggle between East and West (2008) and The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters (2013). He has also written for the New Republic, the National Interest, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, El Pais (Spain), Il Sole 24 Ore (Italy), the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement.

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0300059507
• ISBN 13: 9780300059502
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224