This transcultural edited collection interrelates compendia of New Spain with encyclopedias and chorography of China and Japan, and of cultural encyclopedias of the early modern period. Each chapter starts with an abstract and keywords, has subsections, is heavily footnoted with original texts, and concludes with references. There is no index.

Anna Boroffka's introduction discusses the cover image from Olaus Magnus's Carta marina as encyclopedic knowledge displayed in cartographic form influential on the Florentine Codex. Before summarizing each chapter, Boroffka highlights the rise of early modern chorography (depiction of a particular place as in Petrus Apianus, Cosmographia, 1545) and distinguishes chorography from the broader genre of cultural encyclopedias discussed in Elizabeth Boone's publications on image-based compilations of knowledge. The book concludes with “Notes on the Contributors.”

The first section of Between Encyclopedia and Chorography distinguishes among universal histories, encyclopedias, and chorographies with examples from the European, Chinese, and Japanese traditions. The second section highlights New Spain in discussing Relación de Michoacán, Sahagún's Florentine Codex (1577), Acosta's Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590), and Cárdenas's Problemas y secretos (1591). The third section analyzes compendia and cultural encyclopedias from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries: Anne Mariss on Andrés Pérez de Ribas's Historia de los triumphos de nuetra santa fe (1645), Irina Saladin on Jesuit Juan de Velasco's Historia del Reino de Quito (1789), and Diana Lange on the British Library's Wise Collection, a mid-nineteenth-century atlas of Tibet.

Hanna Vorholt provides thirteen manuscript illustrations from the Codex Aldenburgensis created in Flanders under abbot Anianus Coussere (r. 1451–62). Analyzing Ryoan's Wakan sansei Azue (Illustrated compendium of the three powers of Japan and China), printed in Japan around 1715, Mattias Hayek argues its originality in adapting Chinese categories to Japanese conditions. He comments on nine images from the printed text and argues for the text's influence into the nineteenth century. Valeria Manfrè discusses atlases of Sicily under Spanish rule—Tiburzio Spannocchi (1596), Camillo Camilliani (1584), Francesco Negro and Carlo Maria Ventimiglia Ruiz (1640), and Gabriele Merelli (1677). With nine images, she highlights the relationship of cities to countryside as visual imagery increased in importance in the seventeenth century.

In the second section, “Creating and Organizing New Spanish Knowledge: Early Colonial Compendia and ‘Cultural Encyclopedias,’” articles appear by Rolando Carrasco Monsalve, Anna Boroffka, Susanne Greilich, and Ran Segev. Monsalve argues that Franciscan interpretations of biblical history legitimized the destruction of Tenochtitlan (called “Jerusalem of Satan”) and compared it to the fall of the temple in Jerusalem to the Romans. Nightmares of catastrophe accompany the native decline of belief in their gods and culture. Boroffka views Sahagún's Florentine Codex (1577) as a cultural encyclopedia in which a polyphony of local voices are presented as an ancient and divine wisdom. The encyclopedic structure incorporated the questionnaires sent to New Spain by the Council of the Indies. This very long chapter interprets twenty-two images and argues that the Florentine Codex is layered as a Christian universal history, a chorography of New Spain, and a premodern encyclopedia.

Greilich, discussing order and organization of knowledge in Acosta's Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590), interprets the work as a cultural encyclopedia, and considers the role of prefaces, registers, and marginal notes in its order and organization. Jesuit Acosta's text on Mexican and Peruvian natural and moral history, translated into numerous European languages, was very influential in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Ran Segeve concludes the second section with an analysis of the compilation of natural marvels in Creole physician Juan de Cárdenas's Problemas y secretos (1591), printed in Mexico City. Segeve argues that Cárdenas sought causal explanations by which to understand New Spain and applied the question-and-answer model to ordering his compilation. Within the third section, Anne Mariss discusses Pérez de Ribas's mission of 1604–19 in New Spain, emphasizing the agency of the Indigenous.