In this challenging book, Nicolas Wey Gomez proves something everyone thought was impossible: there are useful new things to say about Columbus. -- Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Department of History, Tufts University The Tropics of Empire is an extraordinary work of history, learned, imaginative, and immensely revealing. Nicolas Wey Gomez recreates the complex and now forgotten world of cosmological and geographical learning within which Columbus planned his voyage to Asia. Through close reading of a vast range of sources he shows us exactly why Columbus thought he could sail south, as well as west, to Asia, and how he envisioned the material and human world that he would find there. Wey Gomez makes clear that Columbus's wide reading and speculative thinking had dramatic consequences in the real world, not only for him but for the inhabitants of the Americas. -- Anthony T. Grafton, Henry Putnam University Professor of History, Princeton University
Nicolas Wey G mez is Professor of History at the California Institute of Technology.
This work is a significant milestone in the study of Christopher
Columbus, his psyche, and the academic pursuit of history in
general.
*The European Legacy*
[A] hefty and impressive study executed with erudition, skill and
considerable insight... Those who believed, following the Columbus
quincentennial, that there was little left to say about a Genoese
sailor's extraordinary adventures overseas will now be convinced
otherwise.
*American Scientist*
The Tropics of Empire deserves to become a landmark in the study of
the inaugural stirrings of European overseas expansion.
*The Times Literary Supplement*
Mr. [Wey] Gómez's volume... offer[s] tremendous insight into the
prevailing medieval understanding of the shape of the world
Columbus encountered and absorbed.
*The New York Sun*
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