ABSTRACT
Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century printers drew from a steady repertoire of images whose repetition was part of the accrediting mechanism of early modern text technology. This chapter focuses on sustainable images and motifs that were borrowed and copied within the ambient of the early modern travel publishing. Publishers like Theodor de Bry and Levinus Hulsius employed entrepreneurial marketing schemes that relied on the recycling of earlier motifs that would have been recognizable to consumers. Among the most sustainable images were those designed to explain the results of encounters with humans from other continents. While perhaps predictably exotic, many of these images were, in some respects, familiar to their reader/viewers. Their iconography sometimes referenced the classical tradition or evoked the format of costume literature. Publishers, for example, borrowed the wings and pouch of Roman gods like Mercury to familiarize non-Europeans. Frequently repeated attributes, such as that of the feather skirt originally developed for denizens of the Americas, travelled widely enough to defy geographical traceability. Instead of challenging credulity, the particularity of pirated designs of monsters actually managed to bridge vast distances by naturalizing the exotic. I argue that the reiteration of these motifs in a variety of genres – a result of the interpenetration of travel, costume, chronicle, and cartography – shored up their authority and made the marvellous familiar to the consumers.
