ABSTRACT
The printed image in the early modern book of exploration contributed more than illustrative or decorative pleasure. Embedded within texts announcing the newly “expanded” world with the authority of the emerging discipline of geography, the images functioned as a form of evidence and explanation of human difference. The woodcuts were visual translations of what Bacon would later describe as “natural facts,” as seemingly irrefutable and demonstrably true as the “thing” itself. References to images in the accompanying descriptions of some early accounts suggest that the images were understood to stand in for the objects they were representing. But unlike human bodies, woodcut images can be arranged on the page without regard to the limitations of place and time. By tracking the textual form of key woodcut images that participated in announcing the “discoveries” of the early sixteenth century, we can begin to recognize how the peoples of the so-called “new” worlds (some of which were, in fact, long known to Europeans) were placed in relationship and rendered somehow equivalent in a system that arranged categories of human difference.
