ABSTRACT
The collections of curiosities gathered together in the name of learning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries suggest that the period's development of seemingly impartial knowledge practices worked to both contain and silently interpret the encounter with what seemed disconcertingly “strange” in the early stages of European expansionism. The written catalogs that accompanied these collections, and the accounts of the explorations that generated the specimens, invite interrogation not only because they shed light on troubling aspects of early colonial encounters between Europe and America, but also because they offer evidence of the mutually reinforcing relationship between canonical knowledge and the hierarchical power relations brought into play by colonization. The texts of the Atlantic crossing offered not just an opportunity but also the imperative for the development of new knowledge practices to replace the ancients’ now unconvincing strategies of elegant but university-bound argument. 1
