Amazons, Savages, & Machiavels: Travel and Colonial Writing in English, 1550-1630: An Anthology

by Andrew Hadfield (editor)

Amazons, Savages, and Machiavels is an accessible and unique anthology of travel and colonial writing in the English Renaissance, selected to represent the world-picture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers in England. It includes not just the narratives of discovery of the New World but also accounts of cultures already well known through trade links, such as Turkey and the Moluccan islands, and of places that featured just as significantly in the early modern English from Ireland to Russia and the Far East, from Calais to India and Africa, from France and Italy to the West Indies. Ranging from Raleigh's account of the Amazons and Captain John Smith's story of Pocahontas to Coryat's cheerful encounter with a Venetian courtesan and Florio's translation of Montaigne's famous "Of the Cannibals," the volume also includes helpful headnotes, a substantial introduction, chronology, full bibliography, and seventeen original illustrations.

Genres: Nonfiction

334 pages, Hardcover

First published September 20, 2001

Reviews

[Courtney · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this for a Renaissance Discoveries literature class (minus the Europe section), and like most subfield-specific and yet wide-ranging-within-the-subfield anthologies of its kind, I think it's probably as good as the professor teaching the class it's assigned in and the surrounding syllabus. I definitely appreciated having a professor who added historical context in fun digressions and assigned more recent scholarship to layer over these primary sources. On its own, I doubt it would've functioned so well, but it worked situationally.

[Julia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not a great anthology, since all but one or two pieces in it are heavily abridged

[William Boyle · Rating 2 out of 5]

Amazons, Savages, and Machiavels is an anthology of dozens of different travel diaries and collections written in the 16th and 17th century, although most of these works are only given 3 pages in the book.

The author of this anthology decided against modernizing the English for the book, so all of the works are written it a outdated form of English, which can make reading slightly more difficult if you are not accustomed to reading books like it. The author also rarely tells you what the word is, so sometimes you may just not know.

The collected stories themselves are mostly mediocre or boring at best, with only some of them being worth reading in my opinion. Many of them are simply going “Catholics in this country are bad, so everything in this country is bad.” The anthology could have been better if they had included a wider range of sources, but many feel identical to the other.

The best part of this book in my opinion is the introduction by the author, just because it is the best written and most informative. I love reading primary sources but just could not get into the ones in this book, which is a shame.

Overall I would not recommend this book unless you are really into books from this period detailing travel, because if you are not you will not enjoy this book.