mapping ethnography in early modern germany

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Reviews

Mapping Ethnography in Early Modern Germany Surekha Davies

Mapping Ethnography in Early Modern Germany: New Worlds in Print Culture by Stephanie Leitch, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, i–xvii + 266 pp., 9 col. and 78 b. and w. illus., £65

The beginning of the sixteenth century saw the

confl uence of the age of print and the age of oceanic

expansion. In Mapping Ethnography in Early Modern Germany, Stephanie Leitch investigates the impact of

this intersection on visual representations of distant

peoples. Leitch reveals how the interplay of humanist

scholarship, printing technology and long-distance

trading centres to be found in Germany in the decades

around 1500 gave rise to a number of prints of the

peoples of Africa and Asia that eschewed vague markers

of otherness in favour of observationally derived

details, and prompted compositional choices that made

claims for the authority of this approach.

After a brief sketch in chapter 1 of the route ahead,

the second chapter explores the Nuremberg Chronicle. First printed in 1493, the book contains a Ptolemaic

world map with monstrous peoples, along the left-

hand border, who have fallen off the previous folio

where two more strips of monsters appear with

accompanying commentary. Leitch’s careful analysis

of the structure and information sources of the Chronicle is informed by comparisons to Ptolemy’s Geography

and to medieval world maps centred on Jerusalem.

Here, examples from the portolan chart tradition of

mapmaking, and of classical and medieval works of

travel and geographical literature, would also have

been helpful, as Schedel’s combination of learned

authorities and eyewitness knowledge, and of historical

events with specifi c locations, were pre-existing

geographical approaches.

One of the strengths of this impressive book

is the way in which it integrates the study of early

German attempts to understand their own ethnicity

as well as the ethnicities of distant others. In so doing,

Leitch uncovers important relationships between

forms of knowledge that scholars do not traditionally

consider together, and illuminates the fundamental

interconnectedness of European experiences at home

and abroad. Chapter 3 argues that the rediscovery in

mid-fi fteenth-century Germany of Tacitus’ Germania (fi rst century AD) led such humanists as Conrad

Celtis to identify the ancestors of the Germans as the

folkloric wild man, and, consequently, as strong and

honourable. Additionally, archaeological evidence

allowed folklorists to claim the classical Hercules

as an ancestral German. This confl ation of classical,

archaeological and folkloric sources fed a nascent

German nationalism, and explains the appearance of

Renaissance prints of Charlemagne and of Archduke

Maximilian (later Holy Roman Emperor) with the

appearance and accoutrements of wild men and of

Hercules. When people who fi tted the characteristics

of wild men were found in the New World to the west,

German illustrators portrayed them using the heroic

– and hairy – iconography they used for their own

ancestors. Leitch argues persuasively that the German

scholars and image-makers who saw elements of their

own ancestry in these distant peoples were primed to


observe, refl ect upon and represent them with greater

attention to their specifi city.

Hans Burgkmair’s woodcut series on the peoples

of Africa and India, perhaps the most sophisticated

ethnographical images from the early decades of

printing, forms the subject of chapter 3 (plate 1). These

prints have been seen as constituting a rupture from

earlier exoticizing, monster-fi lled scenes of peoples

of the distant east and south. This chapter shows

that these prints were also unusual in the rhetoric of

their visual epistemology. Burgkmair constructed

his frieze according to the conventions of accuracy

current in travel accounts, maps and physiognomies:

its composition showcased its basis in empirical

observation. Leitch makes a convincing argument

for considering the frieze as a map. Indeed, the frieze

functions much like a medieval itinerary map. As the

viewer progresses from scene to scene, s/he traces the

journey of the Tirolese merchant, Balthasar Springer,

whose adventures accompanying the Portuguese

mission led by Francisco Almeida in 1505–06 are

documented by the frieze. Each compartment contains

distinctive ethnographic details drawn from Springer’s

account as well as from other sources that distinguish

the inhabitants of such regions as ‘Gennea’ and ‘Allago’

from one another. In so doing, Burkgmair assembled,

as Leitch terms it, ‘a comparative primer’ (80) of the

peoples of Africa and Asia.

This book also impresses in the way it integrates

the study of printed ethnographic images into broader

questions concerning print culture in Reformation

Europe. Chapter 5, ‘Recuperating the Eyewitness’,

takes as its subject Jörg Breu’s woodcuts for Ludovico

de Varthema’s Travels (1515), and sheds light on the

interpenetration of Reformation experience and

responses to voyages of exploration. Leitch argues

that Breu’s illustrations for the German edition of

Varthema’s text ‘visually recoup the credibility of

the eyewitness, a claim that previous travel accounts

had rendered all but bankrupt by indiscriminate and

unchecked use’ (103). If the remarkable accounts of

Marco Polo and Sir John Mandeville had saturated

European audiences’ capacity to believe in the wonders

of distant worlds, Breu’s illustrations, precisely crafted

to give viewers the impression of seeing action frozen

in time through Varthema’s eyes, complete with

1 Detail from Georg Glockendon (after Hans Burgkmair), Peoples of Africa and India, 1511 (1508). Woodcut. Coburg: Kunstsammlung der Veste Coburg (Inv. Nr. I, 63, 33). Photo: Kunstsammlung der Veste Coburg.


Reviews

livestock and boats moving in and out of their fi eld of

vision, created for viewers the illusion of being their

own witnesses. Leitch’s painstaking analysis of these

images reveals Breu as an artist engaged in ethnological

classifi cation: Breu dressed different Hindu castes in

costumes that his viewers would have understood as

indicators of cultural hierarchy. At the same time, the

visual parallels between Breu’s scenes of suttee (widow-

burning) and idolatry on the one hand, and European

motifs and practices such as papal paraphernalia

(visible in Breu’s Indian woodcuts) and witch-burning,

suggest an artisan sensitive to his own culture as also

deserving of refl ective critique.

The fi nal substantive chapter of this book turns to

the iconography of the cannibal. It makes the argument

that the bloodthirsty cannibals placed in the Americas

by the accounts of Christopher Columbus and Amerigo

Vespucci at the turn of the sixteenth century had been

temporarily tamed and even domesticated in the years

around 1550, and metamorphosed into two tropes: the

naïve, child-like but perfectible sauvage, and the innocent

fool. Motifs associated with New World cannibals,

such as feather skirts, headdresses and dismembered

limbs, began to creep into the iconography of exotic

and European scenes on everything from Reformation

propaganda to playing cards. Leitch suggests that

the empirically driven ethnographic impulse of

Burgkmair’s and Breu’s work was short-lived, even in

the work of Burgkmair himself. We are told that ‘from

the carefully tagged regional distinctions of his earlier

work … Burgkmair randomly appropriates costumes

and attributes’ (153).

One aspect of this book that would have benefi ted

from lengthier discussion is the broader iconographic

context for representing distant peoples c. 1500. It

maintains, for example, that such printmakers as

Burgkmair and Breu ‘were the fi rst to release these

native inhabitants from the shackles of a visual tradition

of exotica that had grouped them together with

marvelous beings, monstrous races, wild men, and

barbaric Others, and considered them instead as fully

human’ (2). Such claims could have been demonstrated

and contextualized, rather than simply stated. The

distinctions between German iconography and the

rest, as it were, and Renaissance ethnographic impulses

and medieval ones, are perhaps drawn rather sharply;

further substantiation, with comparative analyses of

German and non-German examples, and of medieval

manuscript illumination and the early printed works

under consideration, would have been desirable. The

important arguments about the empirical innovations

of the German printers’ engagement with distant

worlds would have been strengthened further with a

more detailed survey of mapping ethnography beyond

Germany, and before the era of print. This reader

wonders, for example, what makes the map in the

Nuremberg Chronicle ‘the most complete pre-Columbian

“map” of the world’ (19), apart from its appearance

in the year in which Columbus returned from his fi rst

westward voyage. The concept of monstrous races is

perhaps separated rather summarily from ethnography.

The boundary between human and monster was far

from clear in this period, as were the boundaries

between the analytical categories and frameworks of

monstrosity, civility and Christianity.

In sum, however, this book is a splendid

contribution to the history of Renaissance print culture,

which will stimulate further research interrogating

the intersections between images, knowledge making

and technology. It deserves to be read widely by art

historians, historians of science and knowledge, and

by scholars of Renaissance Europe and of European

overseas expansion.

mapping ethnography in early modern germany

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