With Mapping Ethnography in Early Modern Germany, Stephanie Leitch adds her distinct voice to the vast literature locating a critical epistemic shift in Europe ca. 1500. That she chooses the words “early modern” for her title is certainly deliberate in viewing this period as one of nascent modernity in its self-consciousness, broadening awareness of cultural relativity, use of the printing press, and emphasis on empirical observation (whether actual or feigned) for truth-claims. Leitch’s great contribution begins with the observation that although early modern Germany at the turn of the sixteenth century was not among the first European powers to stake claims over India, Africa, or the New World, Renaissance Germany nevertheless demonstrated a keen interest in representing the inhabitants of these lands and did so with the relatively new technology of the printing press. Rather than root the epistemic shift in an artist like Albrecht Dürer, with his Self-Portrait of 1500, Leitch investigates the phenomenon of ethnographic images produced in Nuremberg and Augsburg—before the modern field of ethnography—with an eye attuned to the visual rhetoric and distinctive power of images in the discourse and structuring of new knowledge from overseas. The “heroes” of her narrative are two figures not well known outside of German scholarship, Hans Burgkmair (1473–1531) and Jörg Breu (1475–1537), who, Leitch argues, “were the first to release these native inhabitants from the shackles of a visual tradition of exotica that had grouped them together with marvelous beings, monstrous races, wild men, and barbaric Others, and considered them instead as fully human” (2).

Leitch’s timely book, which stems closely from her dissertation from the University of Chicago (2005), enriches and is enriched by current renewed interest in globalism and the technology of prints. She is an able interlocutor with the giants on whose shoulders she stands—including Anthony Grafton, Stephen Greenblatt, and Peter Mason—many suitably from beyond the limits of art history’s academic boundaries, representing the fields of literature and anthropology. As an art historian, Leitch is particularly well-equipped to attend to some familiar questions—about what happens when new experiential knowledge (in this case, of global encounters) butts up against the wisdom of ancient received authorities (almost always texts)—with a much-needed lens on the primacy of images and artists in what were collaborations involving humanists, merchants, artist-designers, woodblock cutters, and publishers. What Leitch brings to the discourse is a shift in focus on images and an appreciation for how representation functions rhetorically and structurally within a historical moment and medium. Such attention from an art-historical perspective—albeit one highly informed by other disciplines—elevates images from an illustrative, secondary status as mere reflection of a certain milieu, in travel-related publications, for example, to their role as primary shapers of culture and meaning. The result is a welcome reevaluation of the relationship between early modern artists, humanists, and merchants, with the Augsburg figures Burgkmair and Breu, and the unglamorous medium of woodcuts, restored to their historical importance.

Methodologically self-aware at every turn, Leitch begins by defining and defending her anachronistic use of the term “ethnography” to describe the visual projects of Burgkmair and Breu avant la lettre. Well before the academic discipline of ethnography emerged as a field of scientific study in the nineteenth century, and even shortly before Johannes Boemus’s compendium Omnium gentium mores, leges et ritus was published in 1520, the “ethnographic impulses” of Burgkmair and Breu were registered visually in printed images that gesture toward organizational structure, categorization, differentiation, particularization, and comparison of commensurable categories (5–8). As Leitch points out, such impulses to organize and manage “new facts” were shared also by certain scholars and humanist-collectors, whose Wunderkammern not only might contain material artifacts from Africa, India, and the New World, but also the kinds of prints, books, and images under discussion here. Serving as more than just “ersatz representations” of the things themselves, images “also changed the terms of organization” (9–10), and prints, in particular, offered up a liminal space that could accommodate description as well as ambiguity.

With chapters 3 and 4 published previously in prominent art-history journals—Art History and The Art Bulletin, respectively—the chapter case studies in Leitch’s book can stand alone for researchers or serve as useful teaching assignments for students in art history, anthropology, early modern cultural history, or German studies. However, taken together, the chapters also build on one another productively, constructing a picture of tradition and bold innovation in the development of German views of non-European peoples, without giving rise to a narrative of teleological progress toward modern anthropology. Chapter 2, “Centering the Self: Mapping the Nuremberg Chronicle and the Limits of the World,” and chapter 3, “The Wild Man, the German Body, and the Emperor’s New Clothes,” firmly establish Leitch’s work—as also the printed works of her study—on the side of Eurocentrism, though this is precisely the point. While introducing the platform for a new episteme in these chapters, Leitch reminds the reader that confronting and defining the Other is meaningful only as part of an extended exploration of the (German) self. The idea of mapping, schematically and conceptually, is contingent on locating people and places in relation to one another and to oneself. The chapter on the Nuremberg Chronicle launches this notion—a current throughout the book—within the cosmographic framework of a chronicle that replaced Jerusalem with Nuremberg as the world’s navel, located culture in its numerous city views (many repeated images), and relegated Plinian monsters of the world to marginal page decorations. The following chapter, largely building on Frank Borchardt’s German Antiquity in Renaissance Myth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971) and work by Larry Silver, examines the iconography of the folkloric German “wild man” as it becomes mapped onto ancient Tacitus’s historical ur-German and ultimately conflated visually with the figure of the Amerindian, a new “wild man” separated not by time, but by space. (Leitch notes that non-German illustrations accompanying the reports of Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci do not affix New World iconographies to the “wild man” figure.) Leitch deftly argues that the resultant level of cultural empathy or self-identification with the Indian prompted Renaissance Germans to take a closer look at themselves as well as to newly “discovered” “wild things,” and ultimately necessitated a decoupling of the Other from the self.

Chapters 4 and 5 give full attention to specific examples of this decoupling work in Burgkmair’s remarkable multi-block woodcut frieze of Peoples of Africa and India (1508), which accompanied abridged text from Balthasar Springer’s merchant voyage around the horn of Africa, and Breu’s images for Ludovico de Varthema’s Die Ritterlich uñ lobwirdig rayß (1515), notably both printed in Augsburg. While Burgkmair’s frieze has received renewed recent consideration from a number of art historians, it and Breu’s achievements deserve the sustained formal and contextual attention Leitch gives them here. Both projects represent an interpretive rupture, a departure from the conventional representations of indigenous peoples, whose distinctiveness and origins—whether India or the Americas—had been flattened by unifying signs of alterity in images of feathered skirts, cannibalism, and idolatry. In contrast, Burgkmair particularizes metonymic representatives of the West African Genneans, Algoans, Arabians, and peoples of India through attention to hairstyles, customs, costume, and props—material artifacts observed firsthand in collections in Augsburg—without recourse to grotesque stereotypes or moralizing judgments. By grouping his foreign figures into familiar pictorial traditions (such as familial groups and triumphal processions), Burgkmair establishes levels of similitude with Western viewers, while also providing analytic categories for comparison and the marking of difference. Leitch’s argument extends beyond that of seeing Burgkmair’s frieze simply as new wine in old bottles, as she attends to Burgkmair’s strategy for making claims to visual truth through the frieze’s structural novelty—“flickering between narrative episodes and taxonomic charting” (14)—and his mobilization of empirical conceits borrowed from portolan charts and physiognomic guarantees.

Breu’s forty-six seemingly unsophisticated woodcuts “hidden” in the pages of an Augsburg vernacular edition of Varthema’s travel narrative to India have suffered from art-historical blindspots. However, Leitch recuperates the woodcuts as another kind of challenge to conventional images of the exotic. Even though many of the natives of India are costumed improperly by Breu in Tupinamba Brazilian featherwork—a glaring conflation that was typical at the time—Leitch, nevertheless, argues for Breu’s ethnographic achievements in employing various (if incorrect) costumes with a visual consistency that tags class and social divisions. She argues convincingly that Breu’s images reject binary oppositions of “self” and “other” for a relativistic and heterogeneous presentation of a complex culture of Muslims and Hindus, as he frames and shifts viewpoints in ways that thematize a mobile eyewitness infiltrating local populations and customs.

As the critical core of Leitch’s book, the chapters on Burgkmair and Breu are compelling for their broader implications about the possibilities (and limitations) of art making and the power of representation in defining and managing new knowledge. One great strength of Leitch’s book is its extensive and nuanced examination of different visual strategies used by the artists for compelling belief and asserting truth-value during this period, without the use of written statements proclaiming contrafare and without either artist having actually traveled to these foreign lands. Leitch scrutinizes conventions of naturalism used by Burgkmair (through the systematization of proportion, perspective, and likeness) and his invocation of other media associated with empirical investigation, and she perspicaciously probes Breu’s mechanisms for suggesting the eyewitness presence of the author before a viewed scene. Also extremely valuable for scholars even outside the scope of this period are Leitch’s discussions of the unstable relationship between the images and the texts they accompany, which follow their own conventions. Whether exceeding or falling short of the text, there is always a critical gap between text and image that reveals much about what it is that images can do that texts do not. For the task of vividly particularizing details of costumes and cultures, charting similarity and difference, and establishing categories for comparison, images excel. Yet more can be said about how Burgkmair’s images also mask the violence of Springer’s text against which they are plotted. No longer monsters in the margins, the Africans and Indians showcased in Burgkmair’s innovative frieze via a subverted triumphal processional format declare their particularity, but also are presented in a forum suitable for safely surveying the material artifacts and natural resources available for conquest or collecting.

In her final chapter, “The Amerindian’s Moveable Feast: From Cannibal Roast to Fools’ Fete,” Leitch follows the afterlife from 1520–50 of some of these earlier images and reminds the reader that these phases of ethnographic awareness do not themselves add up to a triumphal narrative of progress. If Burgkmair’s and Breu’s images mark a sizeable epistemic shift, then it is, in fact, a short-lived one. Burgkmair’s frieze promptly was copied, unzipped at its seams and “cannibalized” (to use Leitch’s term) by publishers as early as 1511, now with scenes of cannibalistic roasts reintegrated into its form, the flow of reliable knowledge upended in the name of economic gain. In other examples, images of the exotic—newly decontextualized—are re-relegated to the margins of title pages of Reformation discourses and reduced to playful feather-wearing putti and inglorious fools. Leitch’s final query posing a possible connection between brief visual expressions of cultural relativism and the cultural and theological landscape of the Reformation is left open-ended for further study.

Concluding with this open-ended challenge is fitting testament to the long reach of Leitch’s book and its potential to stimulate additional work in Reformation history, early modern German studies, German visual culture, and ethnography. It is an important investigation that can be added to a number of recent works from different fields that shine a light on Augsburg as a vital center of humanism, mercantilism, and print publishing, and it continues a trend in scholarship that takes seriously the woodcut medium as a space for experimentation and novelty. Leitch not only has mapped ethnography in early modern Germany, she also has mapped herself onto the field.