ABSTRACT
Ethnographic writing rarely stood by itself as a genre in the Renaissance. But – along with geography, history, political and legal analysis, and the survey of trade and travel opportunities – it did form one component in the multi-layered exposition of knowledge about foreign lands. Examples of more purely ethnographic texts are not entirely lacking, such as the Fardle of Facions (1541) by the German humanist Johannes Boemus. Yet the integration of ethnography into works with a more comprehensive scope – works as disparate as Jean Bodin’s Method for the Easy Comprehension of History (1566), Peter Martyr’s Decades (1511), and the popular sixteenth-century cosmographies – lent it greater seriousness and complexity.
