The term cannibalism, which Columbus coined in 1492 on his first American voyage, is the early modern equivalent to the older word ‘anthropophagy’ (from Greek ánthrōpos, ‘person’, and phageín, ‘to eat’). In the early modern period, both denoted the consumption of human flesh. The scholarly literature distinguishes between endocannibalism and exocannibalism, the former being the eating of members of on…