The German Discovery Of The World

Current historiography suggests that European nations regarded the New World as an inassimilable "other" that posed fundamental challenges to the accepted ideas of Renaissance culture. The German Discovery of the World presents a new interpretation that emphasizes the ways in which the new lands and peoples in Africa, Asia, and the Americas were imagined as comprehensible and familiar. In chapters dedicated to travel narratives, cosmography, commerce, and medical botany, Johnson examines how existing ideas and methods were deployed to make German commentators experts in the overseas world, and how this incorporation established the discoveries as new and important intellectual, commercial, and scientific developments. Written in an engaging and accessible style, this book brings to light the dynamic world of the German Renaissance, in which humanists, cartographers, reformers, politicians, botanists, and merchants appropriated the Portuguese and Spanish expeditions to the East and West Indies for their own purposes and, in so doing, reshaped their world. Studies in Early Modern German History

Demonstrates how Venetian newsmongers played a crucial yet heretofore unrecognized role in the invention of America.

This volume looks at how religious identity and symbolic ethnicity influence migration. Religion – Christianity – was an important factor in European transatlantic migrations; religion – Islam – is a major issue in the immigration debate in “post-secular” Germany (and Europe) today. Essays focus on German missionaries and their efforts in the eighteenth century to establish new communal forms of living with Native Americans as religious encounters. In a comparative fashion, Islamic transnational migration into Germany in the twenty-first century is explored in a second group of essays that look at Muslim populations in Germany. They provide an insight into the ongoing discussions in Germany about modern migration and the role of religion. This volume is of interest to all who are engaged in issues of historical and contemporary migration, in Cultural and German Studies.

With a careful blend of concision and rich detail, Sam A. Mustafa's readable and lively text traces German history from Roman times to the present, placing particular emphasis on the past three centuries. Balanced and clearly written, the book guides readers expertly through the complex tangle of Germany's past. Mustafa provides a judicious mix of narrative history and historiography, tracing the influential individuals and broad social currents, myths and legends, and political and cultural elements that have shaped the country. In addition, the book is unique in bringing the story fully to the present with a chapter on the past twenty-five years that explores the nation's reunification and its struggles with history and memory. Generously illustrated with photos, artwork, and maps, the book also includes text boxes to allow readers to pause and consider key concepts in greater detail. Each chapter offers a list of further suggested readings, with a mixture of classic and recent scholarship, to provide a range of coverage of important issues.

Germany has had a profound influence on English stories for children. The Brothers Grimm, The Swiss Family Robinson and Johanna Spyri's Heidi quickly became classics but, as David Blamires clearly articulates in this volume, many other works have been fundamental in the development of English chilren's stories during the 19th Centuary and beyond. Telling Tales is the first comprehensive study of the impact of Germany on English children's books, covering the period from 1780 to the First World War. Beginning with The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, moving through the classics and including many other collections of fairytales and legends (Musaus, Wilhelm Hauff, Bechstein, Brentano) Telling Tales covers a wealth of translated and adapted material in a large variety of forms, and pays detailed attention to the problems of translation and adaptation of texts for children. In addition, Telling Tales considers educational works (Campe and Salzmann), moral and religious tales (Carove, Schmid and Barth), historical tales, adventure stories and picture books (including Wilhelm Busch's Max and Moritz) together with an analysis of what British children learnt through textbooks about Germany as a country and its variegated history, particularly in times of war.

Although it is fashionable among modernists to claim that globalism emerged only since ca. 1800, the opposite can well be documented through careful comparative and transdisciplinary studies, as this volume demonstrates, offering a wide range of innovative perspectives on often neglected literary, philosophical, historical, or medical documents. Texts, images, ideas, knowledge, and objects migrated throughout the world already in the pre-modern world, even if the quantitative level compared to the modern world might have been different. In fact, by means of translations and trade, for instance, global connections were established and maintained over the centuries. Archetypal motifs developed in many literatures indicate how much pre-modern people actually shared. But we also discover hard-core facts of global economic exchange, import of exotic medicine, and, on another level, intensive intellectual debates on religious issues. Literary evidence serves best to expose the extent to which contacts with people in foreign countries were imaginable, often desirable, and at times feared, of course. The pre-modern world was much more on the move and reached out to distant lands out of curiosity, economic interests, and political and military concerns. Diplomats crisscrossed the continents, and artists, poets, and craftsmen traveled widely. We can identify, for instance, both the Vikings and the Arabs as global players long before the rise of modern globalism, so this volume promises to rewrite many of our traditional notions about pre-modern worldviews, economic conditions, and the literary sharing on a global level, as perhaps best expressed by the genre of the fable.