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Article: The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus.(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- The Historian
- Article date:
- January 1, 1994
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1994 Phi Alpha Theta, History Honor Society, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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In the same way that pilgrims to the Holy Land projected on its physical geography the images and scenes of sacred history, Christopher Columbus brought to his encounters with the New World an "imaginative landscape" shaped by centuries of European fantasizing about the marvels of the Old World. Valerie I.J. Flint has attempted to recover this menial geography from what Columbus saw, read, and heard about India and China and to explain how this information determined the contents of the reports of his voyages. In the first section of her book the author identifies the principal cartographic, literary, and oral sources of knowledge about the Far East available to Columbus ...