The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus Available to Purchase

The title phrase, “The Discovery of Mankind,” is glossed in David Abulafia’s preface to refer to Christian Europeans’ gradual experience of the variety and range of human activity and expression “in the age of Columbus,” an age that turns out to have lasted nearly two centuries. The European “discovery of mankind” was a long, and arguably still incomplete, process, but Abulafia’s book focuses rather on the immediate “shock of discovery” (p. xv), a topic he rather oddly thinks has received much less attention than the intellectual adjustments that followed. The book finishes in 1520, well before even the great Spanish debates about the nature of American Indians. It begins in 1341 in order to give full and proper weight to the accounts of European encounters with Canary Islanders in the section “Eastern Horizons: The Peoples, Islands, and Shores of the Eastern Atlantic,” which is followed by equivalent “Western Horizons” and...