Terra cognita : the mental discovery of America
Eviatar Zerubavel (Author)
"Should the credit for discovering America go to a man who insisted it was Asia? Can we say that the New World was discovered in 1492 when Columbus believed it to be but a few islands off the shores of China? In this provocative book, Eviatar Zerubavel argues that physical encounters are only one part of the process of discovery. Such encounters must be complemented by an understanding of the true identity of what is being discovered. Columbus's celebrated 1492 landfall was no more significant than Europe's subsequent understanding of where he landed. The small group of islands he claimed to have discovered off the shores of Asia was a far cry from what we now call America. According to Zerubavel, in commemorating only 1492 we inevitably distort the reality of how the New World was discovered by Europe. America is both a physical and a mental entity and the history of America should therefore be the history of both these forms of discovery. The New World was not discovered on a single day. Zerubavel traces how its discovery was a slow mental voyage that lasted almost three hundred years, when Europe finally established that America was indeed fully detached from Asia. Using fascinating old maps, Zerubavel offers us a rare opportunity to look at how America was envisioned by Columbus's contemporaries. Zerubavel explains their efforts to make sense of its rather unexpected discovery, from the stubborn attempt to force new geographical evidence into the old cosmographic dogma, to the actual creation of a brand-new image of the world. In vividly documenting how a slowly emerging New World gradually forced itself into Europe's consciousness, Zerubavel proves that what we now call America was not discovered by Christopher Columbus on October 12, 1492. The author provides us a new way to think about discovery, one that will interest historians, geographers, cartographers, sociologists. and everyone interested in the Age of Discovery."--Back cover
Print Book, English, 1992
Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1992