Abstract
The "discovery" of the "New World" in the 16th century enabled the formation of a common identity of the European population - an identity that was born, among other things, out of a constructed opposition to non-European societies. Contemporary literature on overseas discovery played a major role in this process.
The authors of the books projected European concepts, discourses, and ideas about the order of the world into their representations of overseas lands and people, based on the European literary tradition. The 16th century was not only the age of discovery of European identity, but also the discovery of the human body.
The body served not only as an object of study and observation, but also as a sign that helped to construct textual meanings. The encoding of meanings involved, among other things, the categorization of people, a practice now known as othering.
Using the example of selected 16th-century Czech written sources dealing with overseas discoveries, I will show the existence of analogies between the microcosm and the macrocosm in representations of the body. This analogy was a constitutive element of Renaissance episteme.
The individual bodies of the people of the 'New World' as microcosm reflected not only contemporary European norms of corporeality, but also the ideal arrangement of the collective body - that is, the whole society, the macrocosm. It structured, for example, the arrangement of power, gender and other relations.
In my paper I will focus, among others, on representations of the bodily constitution, body covering, bodily modifications or the relationship of the body to space.