"Altic . . . has given the world the first comprehensive study of Jesuit mapmaking in the Americas. Encounters in the New World tells the story of Jesuit cartography during the Age of Exploration—when Jesuit missionaries played a crucial role as conduits among cultures, becoming bridges that allowed knowledge to flow between Europeans and Indigenous Americans. Combining European mathematical techniques with the knowledge of the peoples they evangelized, Jesuits produced the first modern maps of many parts of Mexico, South America, the Great Lakes and Canada. . . . Altic brings a wealth of knowledge about cartography and explores the techniques as well as the motivations—political, religious and beyond—of its Jesuit authors. In the process, Altic draws attention to the fact that maps—particularly in their seventeenth-century form—were simultaneously art and artifact. . . . Encounters in the New World shows how inseparable the Jesuit experience has been from the story and fate of the Americas."