The five centuries which have passed since the discovery of the New World have not diminished the overwhelming importance or strangeness of the early encounter between Europeans and native Americans. This collection of essays offers a multidisciplinary approach to this meeting of cultures.

CONTRIBUTORS: Stephen Greenblatt Margarita Zamora Inga Clendinnen Rolena Adorno Anthony Pagden Sabine MacCormack Frank Lestringant David Damrosch Sara Castro-Klaren Louis Montrose Mary C. Fuller David Quint Jeffrey Knapp Luce Giard Michel de Certeau

"Refreshing and gratifying. . . . The epics of the Pueblos' resistance, the Aztec poetry before and after the conquest, and the ritual of toqui oncoy show the complexity of the means for survival developed throughout the Americas, from New Mexico to the Andes."—Jaime Concha, University of California, San Diego"Many of these essays form the cutting edge of scholarship on the expansion of Europe and its cultural consequences. Visual evidence, much of it unfamiliar, is deftly integrated into the textual analysis. . . . This work is so solid, so elegantly presented, and at the same time so innovative that the book should attract considerable attention and remain in use for a long time."—Anthony Grafton, author of Defenders of the Text