Cultural Hierarchy in Sixteenth-Century Europe

Carina L. Johnson, a historian and former archeologist, is currently an Associate Professor at Pitzer College and Extended Faculty at Claremont Graduate University. She is the recipient of a John Carter Brown Library NEH Fellowship, the Barbara Thom Fellowship at the Huntington Library, a Fulbright Award to Austria and the Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities. She has been published in the Journal of the History of Ideas. This is her first book.

• Part I. Categories of Inclusion: 1. Cultures and religions; 2. Iberia after Convivencia; 3. Aztec regalia and the reformation of treasure; Part II. Experiments of Inclusion: 4. Boundaries and cultures of diplomacy in central Europe; 5. Imperial authority in an era of confessions; 6. Collecting idolatry and the emergence of the exotic; Part III. Conclusion: 7. Categorical denials.

'In this original, imaginative, and solidly researched book, Johnson draws on an impressive array of textual and visual evidence to answer the following intriguing questions: how did the Habsburg realms receive and process information on Meso-Americans of the New World and on Turks of the Ottoman Empire, and in what ways were the actual persons, images, and cultural artifacts of these non-European peoples and their material cultures represented and used during the sixteenth century? The result is an impeccable work of scholarship with complex and subtle arguments.' R. Po-chia Hsia, Pennsylvania State University