L'esprit créateur, vol. 48, no 1 (printemps 2008) - Encounters with Alterity in Early Modern French Travel Literature
For more than forty years, L'Esprit Créateur has published studies on French and Francophone literature, film, criticism, and culture. The journal features articles representing a variety of methodologies and critical approaches. Exploring all periods of French literature and thought, L'Esprit Créateur focuses on topics that define French and Francophone Studies today.
Vol. 48, no 1 (printemps 2008) - Encounters with Alterity in Early Modern French Travel Literature
Juall, Scott D.
(Re)writing Self and Other in Early Modern French Travel Literature
Jacques Le Moyne De Morgues, an illustrator who accompanied René Goulaine de Laudonnière's largely Huguenot expedition to Florida in 1564, created the image that appears on this issue's cover. The engraving, which depicts Amerindian Chief Outina consulting a sorcerer for help in defeating his enemy Chief Potanou, provides a gateway to many of the topics addressed in this volume. The sorcerer's contorted body and puzzling gestures, as well as the enigmatic symbols inscribed around a shield borrowed from a member of the French expedition, provide a glimpse into French encounters with another system of belief. The sorcerer's use of supernatural powers to foresee the number and constitution of Potanou's army is meant to benefit both members of his own tribe and their new French allies before they confront a common adversary in battle. Yet the treaty of friendship established between Outina and the French is threatened by the alliances the French have also created with Chief Saturiouna, one of Outina's principal enemies, and a number of tribes loyal to him. Motivated largely by economic interests and related political stakes in Florida, the French...
(Extrait)
Usher, Phillip John
Oicoe-gatou: l'altérité linguistique chez Breydenbach et Léry
Quelles traces écrites la parole de l'Autre laisse-t-elle dans les récits de voyage à l'époque pré-moderne ? Peut-on prêter “ses” signes à une voix étrangère ? Le présent article étudie comment Bernard von Breydenbach et Jean de Léry répondent à ces questions.
Keller, Marcus
Nicolas de Nicolay's Navigations and the Domestic Politics of Travel Writing
In the Navigations, Nicolas de Nicolay deals as much with France after the outbreak of the civil war as with the Ottoman Empire. Through his portrayal of the Turks and other Mediterranean peoples, the traveler turned royal geographer advocates loyalty to the monarchy, religious moderation and tolerance, as well as national unity.
Barthe, Pascale
An Uncommon Map for a Common World: Hajji Ahmed's Cordiform Map of 1559
This article sheds light on Hajji Ahmed's cordiform map of 1559 by unveiling the literary, scientific, and artistic milieus, both Western and Eastern, in which it was created. It suggests a community of scholars who lived around the Mediterranean and exchanged ideas and knowledge while remaining aware of their own specificities, be they religious or cultural.
Persels, Jeff
A Curious Case of Ethnographic Cleansing: The First French Interpretations of the Japanese, 1552-1555
This article compares the earliest “ethnographic” accounts of Japan printed in France: canon law professor Jean Macer's 1555 history of the Indies, which both replicates and expurgates Postel's heterodox 1552-1553 Merveilles du monde, which itself translates and interprets the first Jesuit reports sent to Rome by Francis Xavier.
Juall, Scott D.
"Beaucoup plus barbares que les Sauvages mesmes": Cannibalism, Savagery, and Religious Alterity in Jean de Léry's Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil (1599-1600)
In the fourth edition of Histoire d'un voyage, Jean de Léry compares the extreme barbarity of a broad spectrum of peoples in America, Europe, and Asia Minor. He demonstrates that those in the Old World who wage war because of religious difference are more savage than even the New World's cannibals, who provide an exemplary approach to confronting alterity.
Hurtig, Dolliann Margaret
Is Purgatory Burning?: Opposing Viewpoints on Travel to Purgatory in Pierre Viret's Alcumie du purgatoire
The question of purgatory in Pierre Viret's Alcumie du purgatoire, with its terrestrial and otherworldly reference points and an itinerary followed while traveling to it, was hotly debated by Protestants and Catholics in sixteenth-century Vaud. Viret's dialogue highlights opposing perspectives on purgatory, resulting tensions between the reformers' hope for converts, and an abiding Catholic resistance to conversion.
Ramey, Lynn Tarte
Monstrous Alterity in Early Modern Travel Accounts: Lessons from the Ambiguous Medieval Discourse on Humanness
When early modern explorers encountered new peoples, medieval notions of difference, passed down through verbal and pictorial maps, shaped their perceptions. Pre-modern ideas of monstrous races and a vibrant medieval discourse on what constitutes a human paved the way for eventual questioning of the status of indigenous peoples.
Wells, Charlotte Catherine
Loathsome Neighbors and Noble Savages: The monde inversé of Antoine de Montchrétien
Antoine de Montchrétien” This essay examines how the French experience in Florida contributed to the monde inversé motif of Antoine de Montchrétien's Traicté de l'oeconomie politique (1615). Montchrétien reversed expectations by treating American natives as neither barbarians nor innocents but as people with potential for greatness, suitable partners for the French in achieving a glorious future.
Zecher, Carla
Marc Lescarbot Reads Jacques Cartier: Colonial History in the Service of Propaganda
The parliamentary lawyer Marc Lescarbot (ca. 1570-1641) lived at the tiny French settlement of Port-Royal in Acadia (present-day Annapolis, Nova Scotia) for 13 months, beginning in July 1606. The colony's commander, Jean de Biencourt, sieur de Poutrincourt, had invited Lescarbot to join the 1606 expedition as its chronicler. Poutrincourt, an impoverished Catholic nobleman and former soldier, hoped to re-make his family's fortune overseas. Lescarbot, a bachelor in his mid-thirties, disillusioned with corruption in Parliament, was pleased to escape Paris and embark on a colonial adventure. Funding for Port-Royal was provided by the Protestant merchant Pierre Du Gua de Monts, whom king Henri IV had named his lieutenant general for the "païs et territoires de la Cadie" in 1603, at the same time granting him a monopoly over the Canadian fur trade. During the summer of 1606, however, while Poutrincourt's group of new colonists was settling in at Port-Royal, Du Gua and his business associates suffered heavy losses in a skirmish with merchants from Amsterdam in the St. Lawrence valley. As a result, Du Gua's party disbanded, Henri IV revoked...
(Extrait)
Rosenstreich, Susan L.
God the Father or Mother Earth?: Nouvelle France in Two Quebec Novels of the 1980s
Jacques Poulin's Volkswagen Blues and Le Premier Jardin by Anne Hébert, two novels published in Quebec in the 1980s, assimilate the representation of Nouvelle France to the experience of family ties. The authors first focus attention on the matter of origins, then consider the issue of destiny, both of the individual and of Quebec. Studying his native quebec along with other collectivities formed since the sixteenth century by Europeans who settled in territories they considered 'new', historian Gérard Bouchard notes these New World societies' shared awareness of distance from a homeland, "separée géographiquement et socialement de la mère patrie." What are we to understand by this "mother fatherland" supposedly imagined by Europeans settling in a category of territories that, for Boucher, includes the Americas, Australasia, and even Africa? What is the meaning of such an expression, embracing in its image of familial harmony competing conceptions of parental power and far-flung offspring? Two celebrated Québécois novelists ponder this same question in works published during the 1980s. By assimilating the...
(Extrait)