The Venetian Discovery of America starts from the premise that when we write history, we always write autobiographies. In the introduction and throughout the book, Elizabeth Horodowich asserts that our reactions to and descriptions of what we encounter must necessarily depend upon preexisting vocabularies, as one seeks similarities and analogies in one's own experience to connect the new knowledge to the old.

The author freely admits that she is not the first to observe this phenomenon. Citing Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Horodowich notes, as an example, the encounter between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo in which the latter states, “Every time I describe a city I say something about Venice” (21). Increasingly, scholars are aware of this tendency and recognize that in order to more fully understand the age of encounters, we must accept that the new is almost invariably framed in terms of the old. Not surprisingly, then, Horodowich engages the pioneering work of Theodore Cachey, Stephen Greenblatt, Stuart Schwartz, Eviator Zerubabel, and Nicolás Wey Gómez, as she explores the role played by the Venetian print culture of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries in the reception and perception of America by Europeans, many of whom had never been there.

What Horodowich adds to this discussion is how the Venetians provided a distinctive imprimatur to maps, images, and narratives that describe America in the age of encounters. Venice's own tradition of exploration and its subsequent position as a major producer of print materials created a city perfectly poised to produce maps, travelogues, and images of the New World. At the same time, however, its preoccupation with travel to the East rather than westward, cross-Atlantic exploration resulted in a bifurcated response to the Columbus “discovery” and the subsequent colonization of the Americas. On the one hand, Venetian print materials reveal a subtle awareness that Venice, like so many other city states on the Italian peninsula, had no colonial claim to the Americas. On the other hand, Venetian culture expressed little wonder at Columbus's encounter with the islands of the Caribbean, or, for that matter, European exploration of the western coasts of the Americas, imagining them as mere extensions of the eastern exploration initiated by the Venetians centuries earlier. Indeed, as Horodowich points out, as late as the 1700s the map rooms of the Doge's palace contained not only Venetian-produced maps of the world but depictions of the voyages of Venetian explorers, in particular Marco Polo. The images, Horodowich asserts, impressed upon visitors that “while the Spanish may have colonized the New World, the significance of these conquests paled in comparison to … the travels of Marco Polo, whose voyages had resulted in the first substantial knowledge of the East to which all western people continued to strive to gain access” (220).

Ultimately, Horodowich argues, even as Venice's position in the new world order was on the wane, through its print output it remained relevant. Its influential dissemination of images of a New World that bears an uncanny resemblance to Venice ensured that la Serenissima played a role in shaping the New World—if not in material space then at least in the imaginations of those Europeans who remained in the Old.

Horodowich is a careful and meticulous scholar whose work is well researched. The number of sources consulted, both primary and secondary, is extensive, and the book is superbly illustrated. Just as importantly, Horodowich has achieved something very difficult: without compromising the scholarly quality and impact of the research, she has asserted her own voice; even at its most erudite, the book has a wonderfully personal tone. While The Venetian Discovery of America represents top-notch historical research, Horodowich also branches out into the sociological and somewhat psychological aspects of her subject. The book will, therefore, appeal to historians as well as to scholars of cultural studies, and will, undoubtedly, become essential reading to those who study the age of encounters.