Miguel de Asúa and Roger French, A new world of animals: early modern Europeans on the creatures of Iberian America, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2005, pp. xviii, 257, illus., £50.00 (hardback 0-7456-0779-8).

This publication, which focuses on European depictions of New World animals in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is unique in the history of science and the history of the Americas. Although other histories exist of European interpretations of Iberian American natural history, often focusing on the eighteenth-century “dispute of the New World”, this is the first devoted exclusively to the depiction of animals in the pre-Enlightenment period. It is carefully researched, clearly written, and includes a valuable primary source bibliography of many of the most important early modern European texts dealing with Iberian American nature. Each account also begins with a detailed discussion of the author and text examined, further contributing to the book's value as a reference work. A new world of animals begins with a brief introduction that lays out the chronology of the text as well as an important theme of the book: the Aristotelian and Plinian models for describing animals that many of the writings followed in the early years of discovery, and then moved away from in later centuries. It then goes on to survey various texts that treated the subject of New World animals, moving in a roughly chronological order from the late fifteenth century to the end of the seventeenth. Chapters are organized by the type of sources examined: the first one focuses on accounts from the earliest explorers such as Columbus, Vespucci, and Cabral; the second turns to mainly soldiers' accounts of New World animals, as well as indigenous descriptions and interpretations of them. These accounts, for Asua and French, make up a first phase of animal descriptions that they call the “jigsaw-puzzle” approach, in which the writer deals with the newness of the animal by “decomposing” it into various parts and comparing each part with that of an animal known to Europeans (p. 14). Chapter 3 turns to the more academic and learned accounts of animals in the Americas, such as the natural and moral histories of Oviedo and Acosta as well as the chronicles of members of the Spanish court. These works constitute a second phase of animal descriptions in which the authors grappled with the “newness” of the creatures found by using an empirical approach, describing what they experienced or urging their readers to trust the information presented because it had come from eyewitness accounts. Chapter 4 turns to the more “utilitarian” genres of medical encyclopaedias of both Spanish and Dutch origins that would provide useful and strategic information, while chapter 5 treats various Jesuit texts, such as those of Nieremberg, Kircher, and Schott, that sought to explain New World nature and the wonders it included with mystical or natural theology. Finally, chapter 6 turns to a final phase of natural history writing in which mainly British and French naturalists made a decisive move away from earlier attempts to explain the newness of New World animals in terms of ancient models, natural theology, or Scholastic philosophy. Rather, these authors came up with a new method that eschewed the Aristotelian search for causes and developed a fully empirical, observational, and experimental method by which to record data and form new plant and animal taxonomies. In its careful attention to detail and exhaustive sources, this work is a valuable contribution to the history of science and the history of the Americas. However, its encyclopaedic organization makes it more valuable as a reference work. It would have greatly benefited from more engagement with recent publications in the history of science, particularly those treating the history of wonder and curiosity in early modern Europe (that of Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park in particular), and those focusing on Spain's contribution to the Scientific Revolution, especially that of Antonio Barrera. In particular, reference to Barrera's work on the development of an empirical method in sixteenth-century Spain would have helped to clarify the significance of their findings and contextualize their discussions of empiricism. It might even perhaps have pointed to a somewhat different conclusion than the one they reach: that the later English and French methods were not so decisively different, but rather built upon earlier Iberian precedents.