Making Contact: Maps, Identity, and Travel

Making Contact: Maps, Identity, and Travel
ISBN-10
0888643772
ISBN-13
9780888643773
Series
Making Contact
Category
Education
Pages
324
Language
English
Published
2003-02-26
Publisher
University of Alberta
Author
Glenn Burger

Description

When civilizations first encounter each other a cascade of change is triggered that both challenges and reinforces the identities of all parties. Making Contact revisits key encounters between cultures in the medieval and early modern world. Contributors cross disciplinary boundaries to explore the implications of contact. Scott D. Westrem examines the imagined Africa depicted in the Bell Mappamundi. Day-to-day accommodations between the religious identities of Vilnius, in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, are explored by David Frick. Steven F. Kruger argues that medieval Christian identity was destabilized by the living Talmudic tradition. Individual Jesuits who were critical to the success of contact in Japan are evaluated by Nakai Ayako. Linda Woodbridge argues that Elizabethan attitudes towards aboriginals paralleled their attitudes towards English vagrants. Despite a nod to Arcadian conventions, travel narratives of Virginia were preoccupied with finding wealth, according to Paul W. DePasquale’s research. Rick H. Lee examines the conflicting loyalties of Pierre Raddisson in the New World. Richard A. Young demonstrates that the Florida shipwreck narratives of Cabeza de Vaca were groomed for intended audiences, past and present. This rich interdisciplinary collaboration contributes to the debate on boundaries between disciplines, as well as boundaries between the Middle Ages and the early modern period, and also between historical and theoretical perspectives. Making Contact draws our attention to the important ways in which historic encounters with contrasting ‘others’ have shaped the identities of both individual and corporate ‘selves’ over a span of five centuries.

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