Author Description

Amazons, Savages, and Machiavels is an accessible and unique anthology of travel and colonial writing in the English Renaissance, selected to represent the world-picture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers in England. It includes not just the narratives of discovery of the New World but also accounts of cultures already well known through trade links, such as Turkey and the Moluccan islands, and of places that featured just as significantly in the early modern English imagination: from Ireland to Russia and the Far East, from Calais to India and Africa, from France and Italy to the West Indies. Ranging from Raleigh's account of the Amazons and Captain John Smith's story of Pocahontas to Coryat's cheerful encounter with a Venetian courtesan and Florio's translation of Montaigne's famous "Of the Cannibals," the volume also includes helpful headnotes, a substantial introduction, chronology, full bibliography, and seventeen original illustrations.