In bringing together work on optic theory, ethnography, and the visual cultures of Christianity, this volume offers a sense of the richness and the complexity of early modern thinking about the human eye. The seven case studies explore the relationship between vision and knowledge, taking up such diverse artifacts as an emblem book, a Jesuit mariological text, Calvin’s Institutes, Las Casas’s Apologia, Hans Staden’s True History, the Codex Telleriano-Remensis, and an exegetical painting by Herri met de Bles. Argued from different disciplinary perspectives, these essays pose crucial questions about the eyes, asking how they were construed as instruments of witnessing, perception, representation, cognition, and religious belief.

Contributors include: Tom Conley, Walter Melion, José Rabasa, Lee Palmer Wandel, Michel Weemans, Nicolás Wey Gómez, and Neil Whitehead.