This compact but ambitious book takes on a large subject in a fresh way: the response to the discovery of the Americas in German-speaking Europe. More than one scholar has casually added Germany to his or her discussion of European overseas encounters as a foil to narratives about France or England, and scholars of Germany have sometimes divided between the extremes of Germans as cosmopolitans or Eurocentrists. Johnson instead gives us a detailed, differentiated history of German reactions and involvement in the Americas, which at the same time has wider implications for the understanding of, in J. H. Elliott's words, “the Old World and the New.”

Drawing on the recent scholarship of Anthony Grafton and others, Johnson gives us—contrary to the cliché of European insularity—a fresh picture of a Renaissance humanism long familiar with extra-European cultures, committed to dealing with them as part of overseas trade and able to do so through a fresh emphasis on mathematical studies and the development of new nautical and financial techniques. She begins, however, with a chapter on travelers that points out that, like readers elsewhere in Europe, literate Germans were not astonished by news of foreign peoples and places; rather, accounts of the Americas and India took their place alongside Greek and Roman ethnographies and medieval travel accounts by Marco Polo and others. Authors and editors reported on America as a curious, but not radically novel, part of the larger world.

By the time they learned about Iberian discoveries, writes Johnson, German humanists were already pushing hard to use quantitative methods and impersonal technologies to master extra-European peoples and places. Cosmographers such as Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann, authors of the Cosmographiae introductio (1509), were responsible for mapping the earth in relation to heavenly bodies and attempted to determine longitudes and latitudes; Vienna, Nuremberg, Strasbourg, and Basel had circles of learning and publishers who gave German humanists a place of European-wide distinction in this field. They used calculating techniques accumulated before 1492 and extended them to new parts of the earth; there was no shock of the new, and no displacement of old methods, but rather a process of adjustment. As for the cosmographers' guide from antiquity, Ptolemy of Alexandria's Geography (which began to appear in a “steady stream” of German translations beginning in 1482) contained a secular system of mapping that Renaissance cosmographers and geographers could take up, correct, and expand as their empirical knowledge grew. The Portuguese exploration of Africa—not the New World—was what initially excited their attention by extending beyond the intellectual horizon of their classical model. Again, continuity and assimilation of change seems to have been the pattern.

Three of the book's five chapters deal with the German merchants of the southwest, especially Nuremberg and Augsburg, and their involvement in overseas trade. It is a welcome break from historians' and literary scholars' more usual emphasis on either the ethnographies of overseas travelers or the reflections on ethnographies by educated readers within Europe. Instead the protagonists here are the owners and agents of the Fugger and other great commercial houses who saw openings for enormous overseas profits. With eyes fixed on the bottom line, they were not fazed by the exotic qualities of America and Asia, but applied their accounting methods, ability to calculate the costs of long-term enterprise, and political skills to elbow their way into sites of overseas exploitation and exchange such as Venezuela and India alongside their Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian rivals. Their resources were impressive: they could export raw materials, artisanal products, and cloth, and they had large capital reserves to loan to Spanish and Portuguese empire-builders. Religious reformers railed against the merchants' undeserved profits and the corrupting effect of luxuries, and the Imperial Diet threatened to restrict the spice trade. But in the end it was neither of these, but the intrinsic hazards of long-term trade and the bad faith of monarchs who shook them down for loans and changed the terms of repayment that drove them out of long-distance trade by the second half of the sixteenth century. As long as the profitable times lasted, understanding the “Other” was not their main concern; they were too busy making money and fending off enemies.

As a contribution to German history, Johnson's book defines a bold epoch of humanist and merchant engagement with the non-European world in the first half of the sixteenth century. One can already discern tendencies that would recur in the nineteenth century, when Germans once again combined intellectual cosmopolitanism with aggressive entrepreneurship—and this time, the formation of a meager colonial empire. This study of German reactions to Columbus and his successors also makes a broader contribution to the history of Europe's knowledge of the extra-European world: Johnson's interpretation does not displace—or necessarily contradict—the existing literature's emphasis on the century-long process of comprehending the differences between Old World and New. It does, however, effectively draw attention to the curiosity and openness of German elites as well as the mathematical and applied knowledge that they could bring to bear on new and little-known parts of the earth. This takes us beyond the dichotomies of European and Others to an understanding of the many different ways in which Europeans responded to the challenge of overseas discoveries. Valuable in its own right for its insights into Germany's learned and commercial cultures, this book challenges scholars from many fields to rethink the European response to new worlds.