Michael van Groesen has written, and Brill has expertly produced, a splendid work of scholarship of almost overwhelming erudition and richness of detail. It will be very important, and for a very long time to come, to critics and historians of the early modern period (especially but by no means exclusively historians of the book and art historians). It covers that period not just during the forty-four years of the De Bry family's active publication but for decades afterwards (and some time before), including the collection's rebirth in the Enlightenment as a major collector's item in the book market and as a source (preferred by Thomas Jefferson to Joseph Lafitau's!) of information in particular on the peoples and the early colonial history of the New World. I regret that it wasn't available years earlier: I would have kept it always by my side for reference and context in my own work on such collections and the creation, dissemination, and reception of new knowledge about the world beyond Europe, and so I imagine would almost all the critics and historians van Groesen cites in the twenty-seven small-font pages of his bibliography.

But though the bibliography is huge, the scholarly labor presented here is largely original. Van Groesen, who lectures on American and early modern history at the University of Amsterdam, reads Dutch, German, English, French, Italian, Spanish, and Latin, and has done what no one before him has done, and few would have the resources to do: he has not only fully contextualized the editing, publication, and dissemination of the twenty-seven volumes of this decades-long publication venture, but minutely compared the German, Latin, and, where they exist, French and English versions of the volumes, as well as the originals of the forty-nine texts edited and translated by the De Bry firm. The book also includes a 119-page appendix fully cataloguing all the works published by the firm, including current locations of copies in Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Paris, and Providence; a full-title list of all the manuscripts and editions the De Bry firm copied or translated for the collection, in Dutch, English, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and French; and tables of the origins of all the engravings (most of them textual). The 388 pages of extensively illustrated and detailed narrative that precedes these details is studded with useful, fascinating, and above all revealing data of other kinds: biographical, historical, textual, and commercial, each page richly annotated.

One of the chief results for historians, critics, and even theorists of early colonial global expansion, its texts (visual and verbal), and publications, is an important correction to what amounts to a scholarly consensus: that the collection, produced by a Calvinist family who fled at least some degree of persecution in Liege and Antwerp and settled at last in the confessionally divided book center of Frankfurt, was a polemically Protestant one, or at least consistently biased in that direction. Van Groesen's careful comparisons of the German and Latin editions of each volume show that the De Bry firm was above all a business. Major differences between the Latin volumes available to buyers in Catholic countries and the German volumes read in the Holy Roman Empire and in Scandinavia show conclusively that these cautious business-people were well aware of the doctrinal sensitivities of Catholic readers (and book-buyers — the series preceded the institution of public libraries), and edited the Latin editions accordingly. As a result, “readers from Seville to Lithuania, regardless of their religious persuasion, acquired volumes of the firm's ‘magnum opus’ in the first half of the seventeenth century” (384). The only volume censored by the Index (India Occidentalis III) required the expurgation of certain passages from the Huguenot traveler Jean de Lery's polemically anti-Iberian and anti-Catholic account of Brazil, not the prohibition of the work itself.

This leads directly to another revelation of van Groesen's own “magnus opus”: pace Stephen Greenblatt's influential question in 1991, can we “legitimately speak of ‘the European practice of representation?” (emphasis mine), van Groesen's extensive work of comparison, including detailed analysis of the hugely influential iconography of the engravings in relation to their largely written sources, leads him to disagree somewhat with Greenblatt's emphasis on the “differences that decisively shaped both perceptions and representations” (quoted on 388). For van Groesen, the De Bry family's magisterial (if popular and relatively unscholarly) collection is “the implicit epitome of European self-definition” — “it is, in fact, hard to think of any better example from the sixteenth or seventeenth century which so perfectly embodied the concept of Europe or European — even if no such concept existed as we know it today” (388). This is not just an attitude. Van Groesen's analysis of representations of flora, fauna, and human bodies and customs, especially in the long-lived engravings, leaves little doubt that the firm's strong and influential editorial bias was not Protestant, or Calvinist, but European: a Europeanness defined against those global others who could thus, and fatally, grant the traumatically divided Continent a united cultural identity.

I do not have space here to detail the historical and interpretive wealth of van Groesen's masterpiece. Suffice it to say that it will and must be read and consulted by any who work with its materials from now on. We are all indebted to this immaculate work of dedicated and intelligent scholarship. And this reader at least is deeply grateful for the long labor of its making.