De Originibus Americanis libri quatuor.

£950 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

German historian Georg Horn’s (1620-70) contribution to the academic debate upon the ethnographic origin of the Indigenous American people. This debate raged through Christian Europe in the centuries following first contact with the Americas, as intellectuals scrambled to situate these newly encountered cultures within their preexisting notions of the Biblical origins of mankind. This offering comes in part as a response to Hugo Grotius’s De origine gentium Americanarum dissertatio, 1642, which itself draws upon the scholarship of José de Acosta, and refutes the claims of Calvanist Johannes de Laet. Horn’s work is to some extent a vindication of de Laet. Georg Horn’s present treatise attacks Grotius by stating that his theory was based “without acknowledgement, on the philological arguments of the Dutch theologian Abrahan Mylius, who, in his Lingua Belgica , explained linguistic analogies by postulating that the ancient tribe of the Cimbri had populated the Americas” (Rubiés, 225-226). Horn’s own opinion suggests the Inidgenous Americans descended from the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, as well as the Chinese on the Pacific coast. His theory, in spite of its obvious fallacy, was nevertheless praised for its degree of learning and erudite use of sources. Sabin, 33014; Rahir (Elzevier), 2056; Grässe III: 370; Nicholson, H376; JCB(3) II:418; European Americana, 652/111. Rubiés, Joan-Pau. ‘Hugo Grotius’s Dissertation on the Origins of the American People and the use of Comparativ

• Year: 1652

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