Civil and Corrupt Asia: Image and Text in the Itinerario and the Icones of Jan Huygen Van Linschoten Hardcover - 2002 - 1st Edition

First line

The Itinerario by Jan Huygen van Linschoten was a book that launched a thousand ships.

From the rear cover

Jan Huygen van Linschoten (1562 1611) was a Dutchman who, in 1596, penned the famous Itinerario, an account of his journey to the Indian Peninsula and its eastern surroundings that described the inhabitants of this vast region and quickly became a travel guide for everyone going there. It has also become a classic in the history of European expansion because Van Linschoten is held as a key eyewitness to the Portuguese Asian empire at its height, and as one who worked to shift the center of European expansion from the Iberian peninsula and Italy to the Netherlands and England. In 1604 he published an abridged version, the Icones et Habitus Indorum, which contained 36 of the engravings from the Itinerario together with Latin captions. This very rare print was hardly known to anyone for many years. Civil and Corrupt Asia reproduces these engravings and their extensive captions in English, together with an analysis of them by historian Ernst van den Boogaart. He unravels the hidden meaning of the prints, explaining what the posture and dress of depicted individuals, and the details of larger scenes, were intended to convey to the knowledgeable reader of the seventeenth century. For instance, their accompanying captions invite the viewer to read the ethnographic descriptions in an analytical way and to rate the societies in the different parts of Asia, including Portugese Goa, according to civility. In addition to providing valuable depictions of peoples, customs, and flora and fauna of late sixteenth-century India, the engravings provide unparalleled insights into the inventiveness of early-modern Dutch print culture by offering readers a means of coping intelligently with new information about strange customs.