Nancy Kollmann’s latest foray into the Muscovite past should interest both Russianists and historians of the early modern era more broadly. At its core, this illuminating study is not so much about Russia or Europe, but about “practices of early modern visuality and print culture” (9), thus contributing, as Kollmann rightly underscores, to “a broad literature in history, art history and the history of science on the use of the visual in knowledge production in the early modern world” (1). The result is a deftly crafted exposition of the purposes and dynamics of integrating word and image, “an unparalleled case study of humanist print culture in the making” (13). Kollmann’s “granular analysis” (xiv) of how images of Muscovy were produced and disseminated is, as she claims, unlike anything written to date, making it an important and welcome addition to the otherwise extensive bodies of literature on foreigners’ accounts of Russia on the one hand, and “the burgeoning world of sixteenth-century humanist print culture” (xiv) on the other.

This was an age when territorial, commercial, and intellectual horizons were shifting under the impetus of exploration, discovery, and growing curiosity among humanists and ordinary folk alike about the world beyond traditional parameters. As Kollmann discusses at the outset, this shift was accompanied by the public’s growing appetite for literature that brought new realities and experiences to them. And increasingly, although text whetted the public’s appetite, alone it did not suffice to satisfy it, especially with literacy generally low in this these years. What people wanted in ever more abundance and variety was illustrations—of peoples, rulers, warriors, landscapes, practises, and attire—and, by the second half of the sixteenth century, European printers were flooding an eager market with them. Within this overarching context, Kollmann focusses on a pivotal moment of novel and evolving exposure of Europeans to Muscovites and to other peoples, cultures, and states encountered in travelling through Russia: through Siberian forests, across steppe lands, into Central Asia and Persia. Her approach is to painstakingly reconstruct every stage in the compilation and publication process of works (across multiple editions) we have all used at some point in studying Muscovite Russia—the travel accounts borne of the diplomatic missions of Sigismund von Herberstein and Adam Olearius, as well as Anthony Jenkinson’s map of Russia, commissioned by the nascent Muscovy Company.

It is a challenging exercise, but Kollmann succeeds in revealing the complexity of knowledge production, in particular as it rose to the call of blending text and image. This is evident early on, in Herberstein’s minimally illustrated foreigner’s account, said to have “discovered” Russia for Europe, and especially a century later, in Olearius’s heavily and innovatively illustrated “monumental contribution to knowledge about Russia, Persia and their borderlands” (218). Such works were conceived and written by their authors on the basis of first-hand experiences and research in the orbit of patrons and benefactors. But as final, market-ready, visually-enhanced products, they came to life through the collaborative endeavors of authors, engravers, illustrators, cartographers, and printers. Meanwhile, the visual apparatus integrated into the text fulfilled multiple goals. Fundamentally, the images chosen were meant to convey knowledge and inform readers about Russians and others, often by drawing on existing tropes (regalia for legitimate political authority, architecture for civilization and settled populations, camels for nomads, churches for Christianity…) and engaging emotions. However, as Kollmann persuasively argues, Herberstein and Olearius also manipulated the visual to burnish their own image or that of their patrons (the Hapsburgs, Duke of Holstein), thus deploying the visualization of Russia not only in the interests of the Republic of Letters, but of self and sovereigns.

Increasing European exposure to Russia over the course of the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries gradually chiselled away at Muscovy’s rarity, with the visually-enriched accounts discussed here playing no small role in the demystification process. Images of Russia abounded by the end of the period Kollmann explores, often appropriated, plagiarized, pirated, or repurposed, as were all visuals in this wild, wild west era of publishing. In whatever form or venue, however, increasingly image-laden textual depictions presented Europeans with a Russia that, although exotic in its forest and steppe borderlands, was ultimately familiar as “an eastern variant” (258) of their own Christian, monarchical polities and fundamental socio-economic structures. They also, no doubt, as Kollmann concludes, prodded Europeans to reflect on their own sense of self, the encounter—in text and image—with the Muscovite “other” contributing in its way to the evolution of a “European” identity.