Marvelous possessions1991
the wonder of the New World
by Stephen Greenblatt
This study examines the ways in which Europeans of the late Middle Ages and the early modern period represented non-European peoples and took possession of their lands, in particular the New World. In a series of readings of travel narratives, judicial documents and official documents, Greenblatt shows that "the experience of the marvellous", central to both art and philosophy, was yoked by Columbus and others to service of colonial appropriation. He argues that the traditional symbolic actions and legal rituals through which European sovereignty was asserted were strained to breaking point by the unprecedented nature of the discovery of the New World. But the book also shows that "the experience of the marvellous" is not necessarily an agent of empire: in writers as different as...