Carina L. JOHNSON. Cultural Hierarchy in Sixteenth-Century Europe

Carina L. Johnson's book complements the histoire croisée articulated by Michel Espagne and Michael Werner and developed by Serge Gruzinski in several recent books that have linked European responses to the Americas with those of the Ottomans and other cultures of the world. Considering the ways Europeans dealt with other peoples, cultural goods, and representations, Johnson casts a wide net. She treats the Habsburg Empire as a whole, adducing evidence from Iberia, the Low Countries, and other lands of the Holy Roman Empire, bringing in visual, material, and written sources, both published and archival, from across the continent of Europe. As Johnson indicates, a broad approach to the Habsburg Empire is not new, nor is the consideration of responses to the Americas in the lands of the Austrian Habsburgs (pp. 16–17). Yet she presents a wealth of detailed information from Nuremberg and elsewhere to argue that Europeans' views of Mexicans and Ottomans changed during the course of the sixteenth century. This shift occurred in relation to the Reformation that was causing fractures along religious lines in Europe. Initially Mexicans and Ottomans were treated according to categories of inclusion. Early accounts of the new peoples from the West and the rising power in the East and South included them in a broader system of understanding inherited from fifteenth-century ethnographies of similitude. Mexican and Ottoman envoys and visitors were absorbed into a Habsburg vision of world empire. Objects from widely distant lands were treated as treasures and used in symbolic display. According to Johnson, a process of segregation had begun by mid-century, however. Objects were melted down, no longer deemed important for their sacred or symbolic value. What Johnson in the second part of the book calls “experiments of exclusion” emerged, as frontiers formed between cultures, and negative attitudes developed toward Turks and Islam. Diplomatic gift-giving and ceremonies became secularized because of what Johnson interprets as a need to present an imperial image that was not bound to a single confession; antagonistic images of the Turk hardened. European collections represented by the Kunstkammer handled Mexican and other non-European materials as an undifferentiated “idolatrous exotic.” By the end of the sixteenth century, notions of cultural hierarchy and European superiority had been established.

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