Caribbean Islands in Benedetto Bordone’s Isolario (1528)

Abstract: In 1528, a book compiling maps of all the known islands of the world was printed in Venice. The isolario, or island-book, was a venerable genre in the Mediterranean, but Benedetto Bordone’s Isolario offered a new twist on the old format because it featured American islands. Because it was published during a period in which cartographic ideas about the New World were still taking shape, the island-book demonstrates some of the ways in which Europe imagined the New World during the early decades of the sixteenth century. Most scholarship on the American islands in Bordone’s book have focused on one map of Tenochtitlan. In contrast, this essay turns to the book’s multiple maps of Caribbean islands, which were the initial site of European expansion in the Americas. This essay argues that, by presenting the Americas exclusively through its islands, Bordone’s Isolario was formative in its emphasis on the Caribbean, which in turn influenced subsequent European approaches to the region in the sixteenth century.