Civil and Corrupt Asia

Image and Text in the Itinerario and the Icones of Jan Huygen Van Linschoten

Cloth $55.00 ISBN: 9780226847009 Published September 2002

Jan Huygen van Linschoten (1562-1611) was a Dutchman who, in 1596, penned the famous Itinerario, an account of his travel to the Indian Peninsula and its eastern surroundings that described the inhabitants of this vast region and quickly became a travel guide for everyone going there. Van Linschoten is held as a key eyewitness of the Portuguese-Asian empire at its height, and as one who worked to shift the center of European expansion from the Iberian peninsula and Italy to the Netherlands and England. In 1604 he published an abridged version, the Icones et Habitus Indorum, which contained 36 of the engravings from the Itinerario together with Latin captions.

Divine and Spoiled Asia reproduces these engravings and their captions (in English), together with an extensive analysis of them by historian Ernst van den Boogaart. In addition to providing unparalleled insights into early modern European views of the East, the engravings also contain valuable depictions of the peoples, customs, and flora and fauna of late sixteenth-century India and neighboring countries.

Review Quotes
Contents

"The book will be of considerable interest to those involved in studying the imagery used by westerners in describing and envisioning the east and it would make a good resource for a course on Orientalism or similar issues."—John Walsh, Canadian Journal of History

"A handy and necessary accompaniment to any reader setting out to untangle some of the messages underlying, and reasons for publication of Linschoten's 'Itinerario.' And Linschoten's is in itself an essential book to anybody researching the attitudes issuing from Europeans' presence in the East in the early modern period."—Stefan Halikowskin Itinerario

"As a descriptive account . . . the Itinerario is an extraordinary text. It distills ethnography, topographic description, and social history within its pages--that, with the illustrations . . . provide a breathtaking mine of information for the European traveler. . . . Boogaart's careful interpretation . . . provides us with a pedigree of the better-known Orientalist discourses of the seventeenth century."—Pramod K. Nayar, Sixteenth Century Journal

"The thirty plates and the commentary on them propvide anthropologists and historians with a first sprouting of that ever lingering conflict between, on the one hand, the presentation of the other and, on the other, the observer's analytic tools and the expectancies of readers back home."

Contents

Foreword
Introduction
The credibility of the curious traveller
The Icones 'drawn from life'?
The Icones as a depiction of the hierarchy of civility in Asia
The Icones as a series of instructive and edifying images
Some characteristics of this instructive and edifying series
Did Karel van Mander devise the Icones?
Notes
Bibliography
Icones Habitus Gestusque Indorum ac Lusitanorum
The plates with a translation of the Latin texts
Index

For more information, or to order this book, please visit http://www.press.uchicago.edu

Anthropology: Cultural and Social Anthropology | General Anthropology

Art: European Art

Asian Studies: General Asian Studies

History: European History

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