Encounters in the New World

"In 1540, in the wake of the tumult brought on by the Protestant Reformation, Saint Ignatius of Loyola founded The Society of Jesus aka The Jesuits. The Society's goal was to revitalize the faith of Catholics and to evangelize to non-Catholics through works of charity, education, and missionary work. By the end of the century, Jesuit missionaries were sent all over the world, including to South America. In addition to performing missionary and humanitarian work, Jesuits also served as cartographers and explorers under the auspices of the Spanish, Portuguese, and French Crowns as they went into remote areas to find and evangelize to native populations. In Encounters in the New World, Mirela Altic analyses over 150 of these maps, most of which have never previously been published. She traces the Jesuit contribution to mapping and mapmaking from their arrival in the New World into the post-suppression period and places the Jesuit contribution to cartography in the context of their worldwide undertakings in the fields of science and art. Altic reveals that the Jesuit mapping of the New World was not just a physical survey of unknown space, but was in fact the most important link that brought two cultures together and successfully enabled an exchange of ideas and cultural concepts between the Old World and the New"--