In 1492 when Christopher Columbus encountered native inhabitants of the Americas, he thought he was in the Far East - and so he mistakenly called them "Indians." The misnomer has persisted and with it a host of medieval and Renaissance beliefs and misconceptions about "Indians." Eastern or Western. Those anomalous "Indian" stereotypes generated by the Columbian encounter, both positive and negative, still determine many details of the present-day image of Native Americans.

The authors reclaim the historical origins of still-evolving attitudes about the Indian myth in precolonial pictorial and literary sources. Essential for the initial European invention of the American Indian were both the scriptural precedent of the Edenic Earthly Paradise, itself often placed in India on medieval maps, and the equally ancient idea of the Noble Savage.

The authors document the establishment of psychological boundaries between Europeans and their subject "New Peoples," and how the Europeans' New World was interpreted in light of Christian prophecy.

They also reveal that long before Columbus's discovery, Europeans had attached the same conventional imagery to a host of non-European "Primitive Others." The authors examine the explorers' chronicles to show just how they wrote about, and sometimes pictured, a strange new world unfolding its wonders after 1492.

This original, provocative, and sometimes unsettling book will be important to scholars of history, anthropology, literature, medieval and Renaissance European culture, cartography, and the pictorial imagery of early colonial America.