Summary During the first decades of the sixteenth century, several animals described and viewed as exotic by the Europeans were regularly shipped from India to Lisbon. This paper addresses the relevance of these ‘new’ animals to knowledge and visual representations of the natural world. It discusses their cultural and scientific meaning in Portuguese travel literature of the period as well as printed illustrations, charts and tapestries. This paper suggests that Portugal did not make the most of its unique position in (...) bringing news and animals from Asia. This was either because secrecy associated with trade and military interests hindered the diffusion of illustrations presented in Portuguese travel literature or because the illustrations commissioned by the nobility were represented on expensive media such as parchments and tapestries and remained treasured possessions. However, the essay also proposes that the Portuguese contributed to a new sense of the experience and meaning of nature and that they were crucial mediators in access to new knowledge and new ways of representing the natural world during this period. (shrink)

Jan Bondeson, A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities (London and New York: Cornell University Press, 1997), ix + 250 pp. ISBN 1-86064-228-4 US$29.95 £23.51. -/- Jan Bondeson, The Feejee Mermaid and Other Essays in Natural and Unnatural History (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999) xi + 315 pp. ISBN 0-8014-3609-5 Hb £22.50.