The Album of the World Emperor: Cross-Cultural Collecting and Album Making in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul, by Emine Fetvaci

Abstract

sixteenth century. They represent a scholarly innovation as they reveal the continuation of Indigenous genres, knowledge, and pictographic traditions as they were adapted to encyclopedic European works. Artists often continued to use pictographic techniques when the genres were familiar to them but simultaneously innovated and adapted to the new ethnographic demands of their European patrons. By the end of the sixteenth century, text had come to convey much of the information, even though Indigenous genres and content contributed valuable information. While more research is needed on the roles of Indigenous contributors and the repercussions of their colonial experience on these manuscripts, Boone’s book presents a model for the investigative power of close observation to decipher the impact of Indigenous forms of knowledge in colonial works. Boone’s clear writing and use of numerous examples make the volume accessible not only to specialists in Mexican manuscripts but also to a broader audience interested in Indigenous traditions, European epistemological projects, and colonial encounters.