Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
The article seeks to relate the emerging, new discipline of geography to the European and specifically the Iberian, Catholic experience of expansion, power, and empire in those decades of Spain's alignment with Portugal and their respective colonial enterprises. The case of Giovanni Botero, the preeminent Italian interpreter of America forthe later sixteenth century, is examined in terms of Catholic expansion, world geography, but more immediately in terms of the European civilizing process on the indigenous peoples of America as that process pertains to the pre-Columbian civilizations, Christian conversion and the concurrent practice of the reducciones.
This article is dedicated to John W. O'Malley in anticipation of his seventy-fifth birthday. It was presented in three previous fora during 1998: the Renaissance Workshop at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; the Triangle Intellectual History Seminar at the National Humanities Center; and at the John Carter Brown Library. The author wishes to thank the members of all three for their criticism and especially Melissa Bullard, Peter Burke, Martin Lewis, John Richards, and Ronald Witt for their thoughtful reading of the paper and individual suggestions. He wishes also to recognize a generous grant received from the John Carter Brown Library allowing him to complete his work on Botero at this present stage of inquiry.
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