The moment in which Europe became global opened dynamic debates over the nature of humanity. Amerigo Vespucci famously wrote of gentle and simplistic people in the New World. In 1550, Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda debated the legal and religious nature of those people at the Colegio de San Gregorio in Valladolid, Spain. European conceptions of non-European humanity have been explored by scholars from literary, legal, religious, and natural philosophical perspectives. In Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human, Surekha Davies offers a new perspective grounded in visual as well as textual evidence. The result is an ambitious, transnational study of early modern responses to the European encounter with the New World. Surekha Davies locates her study at the intersection of two dynamic fields of inquiry: spatial representation and protoethnographic concerns about the diverse nature of humanity. These distinct fields are united for Davies...

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