New World Discovery
Journal: Oxford University Press eBooks
Year: 2015

This article examines how English texts register expansive geographical encounters in the period up to the death of Elizabeth.Voyages of discovery and their accounts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries have rarely been considered in the context of periodizing ideas of "medieval" and "early modern."Though once such voyages are read not with the hindsight of the twenty-first century but from within the tradition of prior travel, the newness of the New World emerges as a modern construct with