The “Secrets of Nature” and Early Modern Constructions of a Global South

Early modernity’s attempts at explaining human diversity are legible within the pages of the great compilations of travel narratives that claimed to uncover the “secrets of nature” and present them, on the page, with due scholarly seriousness. This article analyzes compilations’ accounts of the “novelties” of abundant new worlds and considers the mechanisms with which early modern compilations of travel narratives and natural histories set up equivalences between regions across the global “south.” These subtle equivalences had bearings on the positioning of far-away “new” worlds in relation to an expansionist Europe. Composite volumes like Sebastian Münster’s influential cosmography of 1544, Cosmographiae Universalis, established equivalences between disparate regions through their ordering principles and structural devices like woodcut images, transposed and reused to indicate very different regions in the world. These equivalences gathered strength in the English-language versions of Münster’s volume, repackaged for an English readership by Richard Eden and Thomas Marshe. This article examines these smaller English editions, along with Eden’s translation of Peter Martyr’s Decades of the Newe World (1555), to understand how early modern English print culture helped to construct a “global south,” positioning the unfamiliar and far-off peoples of the “torrid zones” in deprecatory conceptual categories.