Marvelous possessions

Stephen Greenblatt looks at how Europeans from the late medieval and early modern periods described non-European peoples and claimed their territories, especially in the Americas. Drawing on travel accounts, court records and official papers, he traces how wonder, a feeling prized in both art and philosophy, came to serve Columbus and others in the work of colonial seizure. He also shows how the ceremonies and legal customs that once signalled a European ruler's sovereignty buckled under the strangeness of a newly found world.

The book does not treat wonder as inherently imperial. Herodotus, Jean de Léry and Montaigne, along with the much-read Mandeville, respond to other cultures with astonishment that acknowledges their difference. Greenblatt moves between ancient Greece and the present day, asking how people living through disorientation, hostility toward outsiders and a desire to possess can keep their capacity for wonder intact.

Greenblatt is a Harvard literary scholar best known for his work on Shakespeare and the New Historicism movement.