Pre-1600: Science, Medicine, and Technology: Publications

Christopher Columbus, The Voyage of Christopher Columbus: Columbus’s Own Journal of Discovery, translated by John Cummins (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1992)—a personal account of the landmark voyage;

Nicolas Copernicus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, translated by A. M. Duncan (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1976)—the classic 1543 work that revolutionized astronomical study;

Bartolomé de las Casas, The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account, translated by Herma Briffault (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992)—a highly influential and at times exaggerated account of Spanish atrocities in the New World written by a Spanish priest who claimed to have witnessed the events that he described;

Marvin Lunenfeld, ed., 1492: Discovery, Invasion, Encounter (Lexington, Mass. & Toronto: D. C. Heath, 1991)—an outstanding collection of primary source readings pertaining to interactions between Europeans and the native people of the Americas in the age of exploration and expansion;

Nicolás Monardes, Joyfull Newes out of the Newe Founde Worlde (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970)—in this translated English text of the highly influential sixteenth-century medical work, Monardes provides an inventory of medicines drawn from New World plants;

Amerigo Vespucci, Letters from a New World: Amerigo Vespucci’s Discovery of America, edited by Luciano Formisano, translated by David Jacobson (New York: Marsilio, 1992)—a collection of works by the man for whom the North and South American continents were named.