Learning from De Bry: Lessons in Seeing and Writing the Heathen

Examining a variety of moments drawn from early volumes in the India Occidentalis and India Orientalis series published by Theodor De Bry and his family, this essay studies the relationship of selected De Bry engravings to the travel narratives they purport to illustrate. It explores how the De Bry compilations both disclose and enclose the pluralities of the worlds their travelers encountered, negotiating through word and image the dialectics of difference and similarity. The complex intertwining of religious, ethnographic, and scientific impulses in this monumental publishing venture reveals the multiple, inconsistent, and often hesitant production of savages and heathens, selves and others, subjects and objects.