Encounters in the New World

"Altic . . . has given the world the first comprehensive study of Jesuit mapmaking in the Americas. Encounters in the New World tells the story of Jesuit cartography during the Age of Exploration—when Jesuit missionaries played a crucial role as conduits among cultures, becoming bridges that allowed knowledge to flow between Europeans and Indigenous Americans. Combining European mathematical techniques with the knowledge of the peoples they evangelized, Jesuits produced the first modern maps of many parts of Mexico, South America, the Great Lakes and Canada. . . . Altic brings a wealth of knowledge about cartography and explores the techniques as well as the motivations—political, religious and beyond—of its Jesuit authors. In the process, Altic draws attention to the fact that maps—particularly in their seventeenth-century form—were simultaneously art and artifact. . . . Encounters in the New World shows how inseparable the Jesuit experience has been from the story and fate of the Americas." -- Michael T. Rizzi * America Magazine *
"This book is the first comprehensive study to compare the characteristics, content, and cultural-political contexts of Jesuit maps from different parts of the Americas. . . Encounters in the New World is a valuable contribution to studies in the history of cartography and of the Americas, especially Latin America, between the 1500s and late 1700s." * Cartographic Perspectives *
"I greatly commend Altić’s book. It is going to be an important source for those interested in cartographic studies, the history of the Society of Jesus in the Americas, early modern science, and the connections between religion, Empire, and technical development." -- Roberto Chauca * The Portolan *
"This important book is indispensable reading for anyone interested in the cartography of the Americas in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries." -- David Y. Allen * Imago Mundi *
"[Altic's] book, profusely illustrated with both black and white and color photographs, extends and deepens our knowledge of the cartographic representation of the New World. She highlights the important role of Jesuit cartographers to the European mapping, understanding and both political and intellectual appropriation, of the New World." -- John Rennie Short * History: Reviews of New Books *
“With this superb volume, Altic has made a noteworthy contribution to the early cartographic history of the Americas. It is exhaustively researched, as evidenced by its extensive notes and bibliography, comprehensive, and critically analytic and, at the same time, clearly and concisely written. The many maps, well-known and those published for the first time here, are necessary to the telling of the story and excellent, especially those in colour. This book will provide valuable reading and insight to anyone interested in the early exploration, cartography and encounters of the Americas as well as of the Jesuits and their scientific achievements. Moreover, it is destined to become an important research tool in the field.” -- Dennis Reinhartz * IMCoS Map Journal *
“A well-illustrated catalog-in-prose of current knowledge about Jesuit cartography in the Americas: from precedents, to missionary practice, to the ways that on-the-ground Jesuit knowledge was taken up by imperial and commercial map makers, to the memory-cartography of Jesuits in exile after the various expulsions of their order across the second half of the eighteenth century.” -- Byron Ellsworth Hamann * Journal of Religion *
"A very complete and authoritative account of the cartographic work done by Jesuits in the Americas. . . . [Altic] focuses not only on the analysis of individual maps but on the interrelationship between maps, the influence on them of the local
communities, and their assimilation into the mainstream of European cartography." * Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu *
“Encounters in the New World will be the foundational document of a new and potentially fruitful area of study. This history of Jesuit mapping for once gives us a complete understanding of the process of mapmaking within a worldwide corporation, and this is very unusual. Altic’s technical examination of the actual process of mapping seems virtually flawless, relying on a massive knowledge of work in many different languages. This is a masterly conspectus of a theme that has not hitherto been considered as a whole.” -- David Buisseret, Senior Research Fellow, Newberry Library
“This book is the most complete study ever produced about Jesuit cartography in the Americas and certainly will be an important reference on the subject. Altic has made extensive, astonishing research in several archives in different countries to achieve an impressive number of more than 150 maps. Very well written and clear, Encounters in the New World will find a large audience of specialists, nonspecialists, and students interested in the history of cartography, the history of science, Jesuits, and colonial America.” -- Júnia Ferreira Furtado, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil