Illustration by Daphne V. Taylor-García

Paesi Nouamente Retrovati (1507)—Countries Newly Discovered

Paesi Nouamente Retrovati was a collection of so-called discovery letters first published in the northern Italian city of Vicenza in 1507. This book first piqued my interest because it was an example of a book that represented the colonial ventures to not only the Americas, but also India and the slave raids in Africa all in one text. It demonstrated a simple, yet important and often overlooked aspect of colonial discourse; whereas most people writing about this time often consider Amerindians in relation to Europeans, or to put it in terms more common today Indian/White relations, narratives regarding Amerindians were constituted not only in contrast to an emerging concept of “the European,” but also in close relation to discourses of Blackness and Orientalism.

Paesi Nouamente Retrovati was the first book of its kind to find a wide audience and be immediately translated from Italian into Latin, German, and French in subsequent years, [1] reflecting its popularity at the time.

Although extremely popular during the height of its circulation, the book has been largely forgotten outside of small academic circles. Beyond a few brief references, I have found nothing in English analyzing the text as a whole. The first chapter of my dissertation represents the first in-depth study written of Paesi Nouamente Retrovati (1507), in which I examine the deployment of sexuality in the production of geo-political difference; that is, how discourses of sexuality were key in concretizing the emerging distinctions between Africans, Amerindians, East Indians and Europeans. [2]

Specifically, Paesi Nouamente Retrovati included selected letters from the voyages to the regions you can see marked off on this map: of Alvise Cadamosto and Pedro de Sintra to Western Africa, the travels of Pedro Alvarez Cabral to Western Africa, Brazil and India, and letters from Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci’s respective voyages to the Americas. For the purposes of this article, I will only look at a small sample of the letters.

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[1] In G.R. Crone, Ed., The voyages of Cadamosto and other documents on Western Africa in the second half of the fifteenth century (London: Printed for the Hakluyt Society, 1937), xliii.

[2] It is important to note that literacy rates at the beginning of the sixteenth-century in Europe were quite low, as only a thin-stratum in Europe were educated to read and write. However, to state that the lower classes were unaffected by the printed word at this time would be inaccurate. Not only would they be influenced by the decisions of the elite, who themselves were informed by what they read, but there were also traveling raconteurs who stood in markets and read from books as a means of making a living. Although it is obvious that only a small portion of society had direct access to a book like Paesi Nouamente Retrovati, the book’s influence on the broader European populace is also germane given how ideas/narratives circulate popularly.