Bringing together popular religious and medical sources, as well as narratives of discovery and exploration, Looking Elsewhere: Bodily Encounters in the Early Modern World traces a shift in how Europeans understood the practice of reading the human body in the transformational period between 1450 and 1650. At the beginning of this period, devotional works that emphasized meditation on the suffering body of Christ taught ordinary medieval people that the body was essentially a set of signs to be deciphered. In medical manuscripts, healers were guided to look beyond the physical, tangible qualities of the body and instead to recognize the body’s relationship to a world densely populated by signs and symbols. By 1550, that world of signs and symbolic bodies had diminished. The Reformation and the publication of Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica put an end to thinking of the body as a microcosm of divine order—or so it has seemed. In fact, I contend that deeply held beliefs about the legibility of the human body as both a reflection of divine order and as symbolically linked with the environment were not so much diminished as displaced elsewhere, often onto the bodies of the Black and Indigenous people that Europeans encountered in the sixteenth century. As narratives of these encounters made their way back across the Atlantic, Europeans were already well-versed in the visual practices that would lead them to read these bodies symbolically, as evidence of a different sort of world order.