Curious Encounters

Voyaging, Collecting, and Making Knowledge in the Long Eighteenth Century

Adriana Craciun editor Mary Terrall editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:University of Toronto Press

Published:13th Feb '19

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Curious Encounters cover

With contributions from historians, literary critics, and geographers, Curious Encounters uncovers a rich history of global voyaging, collecting, and scientific exploration in the long eighteenth century. Leaving behind grand narratives of discovery, these essays collectively restore a degree of symmetry and contingency to our understanding of encounters between European and Indigenous people. To do this the essays consider diverse agents of historical change, both human and inanimate: commodities, curiosities, texts, animals, and specimens moved through their own global circuits of knowledge and power. The voyages and collections rediscovered here do not move from a European center to a distant periphery, nor do they position European authorities as the central agents of this early era of globalization. Long distance voyagers from Greenland to the Ottoman Empire crossed paths with French, British, Polynesian, and Spanish travelers across the world, trading objects and knowledge for diverse ends. The dynamic contact zones of these curious encounters include the ice floes of the Arctic, the sociable spaces of the tea table, the hybrid material texts and objects in imperial archives, and the collections belonging to key figures of the Enlightenment, including Sir Hans Sloane and James Petiver.

"Curious Encounters aims to ‘challenge assumptions about how metropolitan centers relate to distant peripheries’ by focusing on ‘agents of historical change, both human and inanimate: commodities, curiosities, texts, and specimens [that] moved through their own global circuits of knowledge and power’ (9). From an essay about Ottoman horse culture to essays on the role of Inuit people in an 1811 missionary voyage to Ungava Bay and petitions by Indigenous Christians in seventeenth-century Peru, every essay in this collection meets this challenge in new and exciting ways."

-- Kelly Fleming, Kenyon College * Eighteenth-Century Fiction

ISBN: 9781487503673

Dimensions: 235mm x 159mm x 25mm

Weight: 520g

256 pages