With a resounding crash of nature-cultures, modernity began. Contact forced early modern Europeans steeped in Renaissance ideals to reckon with alternative visions of the natural world.

Nature was not, as it happened, all the same as what they had found in Europe. Not only did Andean, Caribbean, Mesoamerican, and Philippine communities rely on animals, plants, and minerals hitherto unknown to Europeans, but they developed distinct practical knowledge traditions around their environments.

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New World Nature examines the relationships between natural things and their environments to reconstruct how early moderns learned from the nature in which they lived.