ABSTRACT
If any one event can be said to separate the Middle Ages from the modern world, surely Columbus’s successful return from his first voyage is such an event. Even if he had returned with news of reaching a few islands off of the coast of Asia, he would have accomplished an historic mission, the discovery of a westward route to Asia. The fact that he had actually discovered an entire world, a New World that had been completely unknown to Europeans, was an extraordinary event, so extraordinary that it was hard to comprehend. One of the most challenging questions in recent scholarship has been how long did it take for Europeans to recognize just how “new” the Americas really were in terms of what they had long believed to be the nature of the world.1 As a result, one of the most important responses to the New World was the effort to include the Americas within the existing intellectual constructs that Europeans had created over the centuries. Columbus himself participated in this effort when he argued for the rest of his life that he had reached Asia, even identifying various plants that he found as the spices that he sought. The attempt to assimilate completely the New World to the existing European understanding of the world eventually failed and Columbus became aware that what he thought were spices were not in fact the items that he sought.2 He never accepted the fact that he had not reached the outer edges of Asia, however, and doggedly sought to prove that he had reached Asia, a forerunner of subsequent attempts to assimilate the New World to the intellectual constructs of the Old even in the face of evidence to the contrary.
