SOURCE: Elliott, J. H. “The Discovery of America and the Discovery of Man.” In Spain and Its World, 1500-1700: Selected Essays, pp. 42-64. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Elliott argues that the measuring stick sixteenth-century Spaniards used to portray the customs and nature of American Indians reveals as much about the attitudes of Europeans themselves as it does about the Native Americans they attempted to describe.

‘Two things,’ wrote Michelet in a famous passage, ‘belong to this age [the sixteenth century] more than to all its predecessors: the discovery of the world, the discovery of man.’¹ By ‘the discovery of man’ Michelet meant European man's discovery of himself as both a physical organism and a moral being, whose mysteries were now explored to their innermost depths. But the simultaneous discovery of the world also represented a discovery of man—the European discovery of non-European...