Detailed Information on Publication Record

Thomas Harriot and John White‘s account of the native inhabitants of Virginia is the first volume of Theodore de Bry‘s Collectiones peregrinationum in Indiam orientalem et Indiam occidentalem, a collection of travelogues. A detailed and serious account of how the inhabitants of the New World were not just bloodthirsty monsters with cannibalistic tendencies, it fundamentally changed the world picture and the transition from medieval to modern thought. The information that even so- -called savages could have their own culture and spiritual ideas helped to change the view of a previously unknown world in Central Europe at the end of the 16th century. Bry‘s edition, in both German and Latin editions, while giving us visual cultural stereotypes of the 16th century, also provides us with a modern Protestant approach that gives the reader the opportunity to compare and reflect on established classifications of „other“ cultures, which are not necessarily only dangerous.