This book provides a comprehensive assessment of Dürer’s depictions of human diversity, focusing particularly on his depictions of figures from outside his Western European milieu. Heather Madar contextualizes those depictions within their broader artistic and historical context and assesses them in light of current theories about early modern concepts of cultural, ethnic, religious and racial diversity. The book also explores Dürer’s connections with contemporaries, his later legacy with respect to his imagery of the other and the broader significance of Nuremberg to early modern engagements with the world beyond Europe. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Renaissance studies and Renaissance history.

The significance of the media and communications revolution occasioned by printmaking was profound. Less a part of the standard narrative of printmaking's significance is recognition of the frequency with which the widespread dissemination of printed works also occurred beyond the borders of Europe and consideration of the impact of this broader movement of printed objects. Within a decade of the invention of the Gutenberg press, European prints began to move globally. Over the course of the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, numerous prints produced in Europe traveled to areas as varied as Turkey, India, Iran, Ethiopia, China, Japan and the Americas, where they were taken by missionaries, artists, travelers, merchants and diplomats. This collection of essays explores the global circulation of knowledge, both written and visual, that occurred by means of prints in the Early Modern period.