Mapping the Renaissance World E-Book

Frank Lestringant

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 485

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

This book focuses on the work of the great sixteenth-century traveller and map-maker Andre Thevat and explores the interrelations between representation and power in the age of discovery.

Leseprobe

MAPPING THE RENAISSANCE WORLD

The Geographical Imagination in the Age of Discovery

FRANK LESTRINGANT

Translated by David Fausett

With a Foreword by Stephen Greenblatt

Polity Press

This English translation © 1994 Polity Press

Foreword © Stephen Greenblatt, 1994

First published in France as L’atelier du cosmographe © Éditions Albin

Michel S.A., 1991

First published in 1994 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers

This book was published with the assistance of the French Ministry of Culture.

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ISBN 0 7456 1147 8

ISBN 978-0-7456-8368-3 (ebook)

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Contents

List of Illustrations

Foreword by Stephen Greenblatt: Thevet’s Island

Preface to the English language edition

Overture: Renaissance and Cosmography

1 The Cosmographical Model

2 Ancient Lessons: A Bookish Orient

3 Mythologics: The Invention of Brazil

4 Mythologics II: Amazons and Monarchs

5 Cartographics: An Experience of the World and an Experiment on the World

Epilogue: The End of Cosmography

Appendix: Extracts from Guillaume Le Testu’s Cosmographie Universelle

Notes

Bibliography of Works by André Thevet

Index

Illustrations

1 Thomas de Leu, Portrait of André Thevet

2 Plate from Peter Apian, La Cosmographie

3 Hans Stradan, The Triumph of Magellan

4 Étienne Delaune, Mêlée of Naked Warriors

5 Antoine Jacquard, The Cannibal

6 Savages in Combat, from André Thevet’s Cosmographie Universelle

7 How the Amazons Treat Prisoners, from André Thevet’s Singularités

8 The Ruse of Quoniambech, from André Thevet’s Cosmographie Universelle

9 New Found Lands, or Isles of Molues, from André Thevet’s Grand Insulaire

10 The Isles of Sanson, or of Giants, from André Thevet’s Grand Insulaire

Foreword

Some years ago a review of a book about the Tupinamba Indians in what is now the Bay of Rio in Brazil remarked that while virtually the entire population had been wiped out within a few generations after contact with Europeans, they had been ‘extremely fortunate in their early ethnographers’. We should all be spared such good fortune. In the case of the Tupinamba, it principally took the form of two extraordinary French observers, Jean de Léry and André Thevet. Léry’s account of his few months among the cannibals, Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil (‘History of a Voyage to Brazil’), was first published in 1578 and has become an anthropological classic: in our century Claude Lévi-Strauss has paid homage to it as the ‘breviary of the anthropologist’.1 Thevet’s main account of his even shorter stay, Les Singularitéz de la France antarctique (first published in 1557 and translated into English by Thomas Hacket in 1568 as The Newfound Worlde, or Antarctike) has in its own way also become a classic, but of a very different kind. Initially celebrated by the poets of the Pléiade as the French Jason who had brought the golden fleece of a whole new world back to his king and country, Thevet came under increasing attack in his own lifetime as a plagiarist, an impudent fool and a liar.

Such charges were scarcely disinterested. They emerged from the bitter, indeed murderous, environment of sectarian rivalry and hatred that tore France apart in the latter half of the sixteenth century (and, not coincidentally, doomed the French colony in Brazil). Léry, a Protestant pastor, attacks Thevet, a Franciscan monk, in terms that explicitly reflect the preoccupations of the religious wars, and Thevet’s attacks on Léry are similarly motivated. But Thevet, who became aumonier to Catherine de Medici and Royal Cosmographer to the Valois kings, had the distinction of being attacked by fellow Catholics as well as Protestants. In the quarrels that swirled around his work there are the signs not only of doctrinal struggles but also of momentous shifts in the European understanding of what it meant to chart, describe and analyse the physical world and its human inhabitants.

That Thevet rather than Léry is the central figure of Frank Lestringant’s Mapping the Renaissance World tells us a great deal about the project of this book. ‘The Geographical Imagination in the Age of Discovery’, Lestringant’s subtitle and the object of his investigation, is less the origin of modern cartographic and ethnographic practices than it is the key to a vanished world, a world with a different set of interests and anxieties, a different standard of proof and disproof, a different sense of scale. That world, with its distinctive preoccupations and epistemology, began to change during Thevet’s own lifetime, so that his works, once so central, began to drift uneasily towards an increasingly eccentric isolation. By the next century they had fallen into almost complete neglect, and the great Thevet was remembered, if he was remembered at all, as a fraud.

But Mapping the Renaissance World is not simply important as a piece of historical reconstruction. In the past few years Thevet has enjoyed something of a revival, a renewed interest whose sources are only partly antiquarian. Sceptical critiques of the conventions that underlie our own maps of the world have made it possible to call into question the positivist teleology that ranked all previous efforts by their relative proximity to or distance from strict scientific accuracy. Similarly, a growing awareness of the rhetorical conventions and complex purposes that shape anthropological writing in our own age has enabled us to investigate with something other than derision the conventions and purposes that governed in other ages the description of places and cultures. These changes in our intellectual climate are exquisitely articulated by Italo Calvino’s postmodern fiction Invisible Cities, with its playful, disconnected descriptions of cities that jumble the features of the known and the unknown, systematically inverting the familiar and domesticating the strange, mingling memory and desire, fear and longing.

Calvino’s Marco Polo entertains the Great Khan with accounts of cities that he has actually visited, cities that he has only read about and cities that he has invented – and, as the tales unfold, the distinctions seem increasingly untenable. The Great Khan, Calvino tells us, ‘owns an atlas whose drawings depict the terrestrial globe all at once and continent by continent, the borders of the most distant realms, the ships’ routes, the coastlines, the maps of the most illustrious metropolises and of the most opulent ports’. He leafs through the pages of his atlas in order to put Marco Polo to the test. The distinguished traveller recognizes some of the cities from first-hand experience and clear signs – Constantinople, Jerusalem, Samarkand; for others ‘he falls back on descriptions handed down by word of mouth, or he guesses on the basis of scant indications.’ The atlas contains still other cities of whose existence neither Marco Polo nor any other geographer is aware, ‘though they cannot be missing among the forms of possible cities’. But even here the traveller is not at a loss: ‘For these, too, Marco says a name, no matter which, and suggests a route to reach them. It is known that names of places change as many times as there are foreign languages; and that every place can be reached from other places, by the most various roads and routes.’2 We are, without quite knowing it, re-entering the world of André Thevet.

But Calvino’s work is a fiction, self-consciously and deliberately distanced from any known world. Thevet and the other mid-sixteenth-century geographers discussed in Mapping the Renaissance World insist, with an earnestness that often topples into belligerence, that they are representing reality itself, a reality that they claim to have seen in most cases with their own eyes. In 1595 Sir Walter Ralegh took a copy of Thevet’s Singularitéz with him on his voyage to Guiana and verified what must have appeared to European readers one of the most improbable of traveller’s tales: oysters that grow on trees. ‘One salt river’, Ralegh writes, ‘had store of oisters upon the branches of the trees, and were very salt and well tasted.’ ‘This tree is described by Andrew Thevet’, he adds, ‘in his French Antarctique, and the forme figured in the booke as a plant very strange, and by Plinie in his 12. booke of his naturall historie. But in this yland, as also in Guiana there are very many of them.’3 What could have seemed like a palpable sign of lying – Thevet’s recycling in a description of the New World of a marvel reported in an ancient text notoriously full of wild improbabilities – is certified as the plain truth by Ralegh’s own eye-witness observation.

Even when such direct proof eludes him, Ralegh finds himself uneasily confirming or at least seriously entertaining the still more improbable claims of the fourteenth-century traveller Sir John Mandeville. Mandeville had reported the existence of a race of people whose heads grew beneath their shoulders: ‘there are ugly folk without heads, who have eyes in each shoulder; their mouths are round, like a horseshoe, in the middle of their chest.’4 Cosmographers conventionally located such creatures – along with Sciapods (creatures with one enormous foot), Pygmies, hairy wild men, Amazons, and the like – at the extreme edges of the world, and Ralegh hears of exactly such people in Guiana: ‘they are called Ewaipanoma: they are reported to have their eyes in their shoulders, and their mouthes in the middle of their breasts, and that a long traine of haire groweth backward betweene their shoulders’.5 To be sure, in this case, Ralegh cannot personally attest to their existence. He only chanced to hear of them, he writes, after he left the region; ‘if I had but spoken one worde of it while I was there, I might have brought one of them with mee to put the matter out of doubt.’ Ralegh is glancing here at the familiar European practice of bringing samples, including human samples, back from the newly discovered lands, in order to allow those at home to savour the wonders and confirm for themselves the truth of the travellers’ tales. If eye-witnessing has been frustrated on this occasion, Ralegh is still inclined to believe in the existence of the Ewaipanoma: ‘Such a nation’, he writes,

was written of by Mandevile, whose reports were holden for fables many yeeres, and yet since the East Indies were discovered, we find his relations true of such things as heretofore were held incredible: whether it be true or no, the matter is not great, neither can there bee any profit in the imagination; for mine owne part I saw them not, but I am resolved that so many people did not all combine, or forethinke to make the report.6

The queasy confusions of this long last sentence, lurching from scepticism to wonder to professed indifference and then to resolved acceptance, will repay some attention as a compressed index of the geographical imagination explored with so much subtlety and learning in Lestringant’s book. Ralegh is careful to indicate that he knows that Mandeville’s Travels have lost their credibility and that what were once taken to be accurate reports of distant lands have long been dismissed by informed readers as ‘fables’. But the vast expansion of European knowledge of the rest of the world (exemplified for an Elizabethan Englishman by the circumnavigations of the globe by Drake and Cavendish) has confounded the secure boundary between fable and reality, verified what seemed incredible, and renewed the old cosmographic dreams.

It is in just this spirit that Ralegh’s friend, the poet Edmund Spenser, responds to charges that the tales in The Faerie Queene are ‘painted forgery, / Rather than matter of just memory’. Spenser urges his readers to reflect on the discoveries of great regions that had until recently been unknown to exist:

Who ever heard of th’Indian Peru?Or who in venturous vessel measuredThe Amazons huge river now found trew?Or fruitfullest Virginia who did ever vew?

Yet all these were, when no man did them know:Yet have from wisest ages hidden beene:And later times things more unknowne shall show. (Faerie Queene II.Proem. 2–3)

The blunt ethnocentrism of these lines – ‘when no man did them know’ – would probably not have disturbed Ralegh, but he might well have reflected uneasily on the fact that by this logic anything, however blatantly fabulous, could be justified and said to exist. (Spenser goes on to invoke the possibility of ‘other worlds’ on the moon or stars.) Ralegh had no desire to present his report on Guiana as a poet’s dream, and he hastens to distance himself from the rehabilitation of Mandeville on which he had briefly embarked: ‘whether it be true or no, the matter is not great, neither can there bee any profit in the imagination.’ There might, the words may imply, be some profit in the reality, for people at home would certainly pay to see a man whose head grew beneath his shoulders. ‘Were I in England now’, says a traveller upon seeing the savage Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, ‘not a holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver: there would this monster make a man; any strange beast there makes a man: when they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian’ (2.2.28–34). But (except for a gifted playwright) there is no profit in a mere story.

Ralegh assures his readers then that he knows the difference between reality and imagination (an important but difficult distinction for anyone in search of El Dorado), just as he knows the difference between great matters and small. And yet he does not let the subject rest there: ‘for mine owne part I saw them not, but I am resolved that so many people did not all combine, or forethinke to make the report.’ In the wake of the mingled scepticism and belief, the cross-currents of empiricism and imagination, we glimpse one of the key principles of the Renaissance geographical imagination: eye-witness testimony, for all its vaunted importance, sits as a very small edifice on top of an enormous mountain of hearsay, rumour, convention and endlessly recycled fable.

Hence it is altogether appropriate that Ralegh carries Mandeville with him to South America, for though the Elizabethan traveller inhabits a far different world from that of his medieval predecessor and is one of the avatars of English colonial exploration and settlement, he, like Thevet, shares much with the older cosmographical practice. When Ralegh or Thevet insist on what they themselves have seen with their own eyes, they are not in fact distancing themselves from this older practice so much as reproducing its traditional and time-honoured mode of self-authorization. Mandeville’s Travels consists almost entirely of plagiarized passages from other travel accounts, passages cleverly stitched together and rhetorically heightened by claims of personal experience (occasionally leavened by sententious criticisms of the supposed exaggerations and plagiarisms of other, less scrupulous voyagers). Thevet is a master of this genre. To be sure, in his early years he did actually travel and observe and record, but his cosmographical volumes insist on the primacy of experience over authority and claim direct observation even when he is shamelessly engaged in absorbing and reproducing a host of authorities. As we have seen, Thevet’s contemporaries were not blind to the game, and the rules were beginning to change. In his great collection of travel documents, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation, Richard Hakluyt, who had direct dealings with Thevet for several years, prints Thomas Nichols’s account of the Canary Islands, occasioned, its author writes, by the ‘great untruths, in a booke called The New found world Antarctike set out by a French man called Andrew Thevet’. ‘It appeareth by the sayd booke’, Nichols remarks sourly, that Thevet ‘had read the works of sundry Phylosophers, Astronomers, and Costmographers, whose opinions he gathered together’ (VI, 125). Nichols does not intend this characterization as a compliment, but it does fairly describe one major aspect of what Lestringant calls the cosmographer’s atelier. The competitive world of Renaissance book publishing intensified the claims of individual authorship, but in fact cosmography was necessarily a collaborative performance, the product of a workshop.

Mandeville’s fourteenth-century assemblage of texts led in the direction of an unusual tolerance: he praises the Muslim sultan and his well-ordered state, admires the intense piety of Indian idol-worshippers and is led by his encounter with the virtuous Brahmins to declare that ‘men should despise no men for the difference of their laws.’ For, Mandeville adds, ‘we know not whom God loves nor whom He hates; and therefore when I pray for the dead and say my De Profundis, I say it for all Christian souls and also for all the souls who need praying for’.7 By the mid-sixteenth century, knowledge of the world had expanded, along with the power and ambition of European states, but the spirit of tolerance seems to have contracted. ‘These wilde men of America’, Thevet writes of the Tupinamba among whom he spent ten weeks, ‘haue no more ciuilitie in their eating, than in other things.’ ‘Walking in darknesse, and ignorant of the truthe’, they are not ‘reasonable’ creatures and ‘are subiect to many fantastical illusions & persecutions of wicked spirites’; indeed they worship the devil. They war among themselves ‘euen like brute beasts’ and eat their enemies: ‘We finde not in no Historie of any nation, be it neuer so straunge and barbarous, that hathe vsed the like crueltie as these haue done.’8 The ‘poor folk’ of Thevet’s Antarctica, as Lestringant writes, possessed neither the natural virtue attributed to them by Montaigne nor the simple happiness projected on them by European pastoral or Ovidian poetry; rather they ‘defined the contradictory paradigm of a non-Christian humanity’.

But in one of the most interesting surprises in a study filled with unexpected turns, Mapping the Renaissance World argues that Thevet’s portrait of the Brazilians is in fact considerably less intolerant and reductive than the ‘noble savage’ of the philosophes, ‘a pale abstraction fleshed out by no concrete ethnographic content’. The difference comes about not so much because Thevet finds particular features to admire in the very peoples whose barbarousness, ignorance and cruelty he has roundly condemned – though he repeatedly does so – as because all recorded features, whether virtuous or vicious, are for Thevet ‘singularities’, traits that are irreducible and often contradictory. That is, the very incoherence of his cosmography allows a jumbled confusion of remarkable observations, much like the unsystematized, wildly various contents of the ‘wonder cabinets’ beloved of Renaissance collectors. Thevet’s Tupinamba are like living wonder cabinets: ‘Cruel and debauched or virtuous and hospitable, a man of honour or a “great thief”, the labels stuck on him in turn or simultaneously seem regulated’, Lestringant observes, ‘by a constantly mobile code modelled, from detail to detail, on the particularity being thrown into relief on each occasion.’ And Thevet himself seems the embodiment of what Claude Lévi-Strauss characterizes as ‘la pensée sauvage’, the mind of the ‘bricoleur’ who makes do with whatever tools and materials are at hand, fashioning out of a finite series of elements a whole mythopoetic world.

Hence the big summary judgements, generally coarsely intolerant, at which we have already glanced, function paradoxically not as ethnographic straitjackets but as large, featureless rooms into which Thevet can throw whatever he has picked up from his own observations and from those of his informants (such as mariners, soldiers or the notorious ‘truchements Normands’, Norman translators who lived with the natives and were said to have stopped short at nothing, including cannibalism), as well as from his reading and imagination. Take, for example, Thevet’s flat declaration that the Brazilian savages have no more civility in their eating than in anything else they do. ‘As they haue no lawes to take the good, & to eschue the euil’, he sententiously declares, ‘euen so they eat of al kinds of meats at al times and houres, without any other discretion.’ No sooner has Thevet clear-cut the forest in this brutal way than he begins to describe in remarkable detail the actual trees:

In deed they are of themselues superstitious, they will eat no beast nor fish, that is heauy or slow in going, but of all other light meats in running & flying, as Venison and such like, for because that they haue this opinion, that heauie meates wil hurte and anoy them when they should be assailed of their enimies. Also they wil eate no salte meates, nor yet permit their children to eate any … In their repast they kepe a maruellous silence, the which is more to be commended, than amongst vs that bable and talke at our tables, they doe seethe and roast very well their meate, and eat it measurably and not rashly, mocking vs that deuoure in steade of eating: they will not drinke when they eate, nor eate when they drink.9

On and on the ethnographic particulars pour out, utterly confounding the initial statement – a statement not, however, retracted – that the savages have no ‘discretion’ in their eating. Not only does Thevet hold up certain of these particulars as implicit or explicit reproaches to European eating habits, but he also offers (apparently at second hand) one of the earliest instances of the international standard of taste: the Tupinamba, he reports, eat giant lizards whose meat ‘as they say that haue eate thereof’ tastes like chicken.

Where are we at the end of Thevet’s account of Tupinamba eating – or religion or warfare or marriage or any of the other practices that inspire his blend of bullying, borrowing, inventing, observing, singularizing? It is difficult to say. Lestringant cannily invokes the imaginary encyclopaedia by Borges that fascinated Foucault, with its system of correspondences that allows the most incongruous things to be conjoined and thereby ruins all principles of systematic classification. Elsewhere, to characterize the twisted, hidden links that the cosmographer forges between self and Other, savage and civilized, ancient and modern, Lestringant invokes Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizome, with its strange, subterranean propagation. But it is Lestringant’s concept of the geographical imagination, a concept influenced by the ground-breaking theoretical work of Michel de Certeau, that is at the centre of Mapping the Renaissance World. The book enables us to understand this geographical imagination in its cultural and historical specificity. And it leads us to understand Thevet as a strange, compelling instance of the Renaissance fascination with the invention – at once the finding and the fabricating – of reality. Spenser responded to reports of ‘fruitfullest Virginia’ by insisting that his own fairyland could therefore claim to be real. Thevet actually glimpsed the New World and returned to tell his royal master and his countrymen what he had witnessed. Among its singular marvels was an island ‘set as eight degrees ten minutes on the other side of the Equator to the south-southeast’. On this island, which had never before been discovered, Thevet landed to find fresh water:

The inhabitants and governors of it were only birds of divers plumages and sizes in great numbers, but also beautiful fruit trees of several kinds and colors. And when we thought to go into the isle, because of its thick woods, I perceived some hills and on these I discovered that there were some grape leaves. As for the trees I never saw any like them, and you would have judged this place to be a second paradise.10

The island, utterly spurious yet carefully drawn in a map as if the cosmographer himself hoped to return there some day, is labelled ‘l’Isle de Thevet’.

Stephen Greenblatt

University of California

Notes

1 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques, trans. John Russell (New York: Atheneum, 1970), p. 85.

2 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1974), pp. 106–7.

3 Sir Walter Ralegh, ‘The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Beautifull Empire of Guiana’, in The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation, ed. Richard Hakluyt, 12 vols (Glasgow: James MacLehose & Sons, 1903) X, 349–50.

4The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, trans. C. W. R. D. Moseley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), p. 137.

5 Ralegh, ‘The Discoverie’, p. 406.

6 Ibid.

7The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, p. 280.

8Les Singularitéz de la France antarctique, trans. Thomas Hacket (London, 1568), pp. 46, 52–3, 59, 62–3. The title of Thevet’s work in Hacket’s translation reveals the range of interests to which it appealed: The Newfound worlde, or Antarctike, wherein is contained wonderful and strange things, as well of humaine creatures, as Beastes, Fishes, Foules, and Serpents, Trees, Plants, Mines of Golde and Siluer; garnished with many learned authorities … wherein is reformed the errours of the auncient Cosmographers.

9 Ibid., pp. 46–7.

10André Thevet’s North America: A Sixteenth-Century View, ed. and trans. Roger Schlesinger and Arthur P. Stabler (Kingston and Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1986), p. 50.

Preface to the English language edition

It might seem that, in its translation from French into English, this book has changed its scope, not merely in addressing a wider audience, but also by adopting a more wide-ranging title. L’Atelier du cosmographe implied the image of a geographer confined in his workshop; Mapping the Renaissance World suggests an opening-up to the distant unknowns of the great voyages. The object obviously remains the same, but the two titles shed a complementary light on it.

The notion of the ‘workshop’ put the emphasis on the affinity of Renaissance geography with the cabinets de curiosité. This aspect is prominent in the work of André Thevet (1516–92), the last Valois kings’ cosmographer, who is at the centre of this book. Comparable to an artist’s workshop, Thevet’s cosmography resembles a jumbled series of unfinished investigations, made up of more or less completed projects and sketches, with a heap of heterogeneous objects, which at first sight seem pointless. It is reminiscent of the different workshops which Picasso used during his long career, in Paris, Boisgeloup, Vallauris and Vauvenargues, and which, after his departure, he always left uncleared, full of an incredible amount of bric-à-brac. Luckily enough, Thevet’s cosmographical work in progress has reached us nearly intact, with the creative untidiness of its tools and its materials, both unusual and ridiculous: maps of islands by the hundred, draft copies of his last unfinished books, representing up to four distinct stages of his work, and meticulously annotated mariners’ charts. This Wunderkammer lacks only the monsters and prodigies that Thevet collected in what he called his ‘most precious cabinet’. All this provides an ideal base for an ‘archaeological’ exploration of Renaissance geography.

The second meaning of ‘workshop’ is equally relevant. Renaissance cosmography is a collective undertaking, requiring a master with craftsmen under him, in this case disinterested informers, ghost-writers and the Flemish engravers he brought to Paris. Such cosmography is built up on a do-it-yourself basis which exploits many sorts of materials: travel narratives and navigation reports, along with indigenous artefacts and myths. It relies on popular legends as well as scholarly tradition, the latter, paradoxically, being refuted with all the more energy since it provides one of the main threads of the cosmographic whole. After visiting the geographer’s working place, this book then turns to the construction of the world.

The English title, Mapping the Renaissance World, which was suggested by the publisher and of which I approved immediately, may seem too optimistic, but it provides an accurate expression of the geographical ambition of the Renaissance: the reduction of the world to a wooden sphere, the summation of its burgeoning diversity on vellum paper or on an atlas sheet. More subtly, perhaps, it suggests that cosmography – the science of the world – was not a hierarchized and ordered construction, in spite of its effort to grasp the principle and the totality of the world, but that it is conceived, rather, as a landscape made up of drawing and writing, with its upward and downward strokes, and its reliefs and empty spaces. The reference to the cartographer’s activity also suggests the role of aesthetics and play in the inventory of the cosmos, which at the same time is an exploration of the endless archipelago of knowledge. From this derives the double character of the process: looking both backwards to the past and ahead to the future. Through his interest in the ‘primitive thought’ of the inhabitants of Brazil and his intuition of the incompleteness of the world as it was then known, the ‘naïve’ Thevet might well be one of the first postmodern writers.

At this point, I would like to thank Michel Jeanneret, one of the very first readers of this research, whose friendly help has opened the way towards this English edition. The translation is due to the competence of David Fausett, who has enriched the notes with explanations that were necessary for an English-speaking public. He is also the origin of some of the remarks on the fine (but unfaithful) translation by Thomas Hacket, who was more generous than subsequent critics in considering ‘Master Andrewe Thevet’ as an ‘excellent learned man’.

Frank Lestringant, 1993

Overture: Renaissance and Cosmography

In approaching the geographical literature of the Renaissance, several critical models come to hand. One might, like Gilbert Chinard early this century,1 have recourse to the notion of ‘exoticism’ in order to gauge the evolution, at the progressively enlarged fringes of the oikoumene, of marvellous realities bequeathed by earlier ages and gradually idealized or allegorized into new myths. Thus, an enrichment of the stock of prodigies handed down by Pliny and his followers, such as Solinus and Pomponius Mela, had the effect of slowly eroding traditional taxonomic frameworks. From the resulting encyclopaedic chaos (which is well reflected in the work of André Thevet) there belatedly arose that figure of the Other, the Noble Savage, whose euphoric portrait would take two centuries to crystallize. From Columbus to Chateaubriand, by way of Montaigne and Rousseau, one witnesses the painful and constantly delayed birth of that man of nature, each time more youthful and free of servitude.

This positivist vision of history tends to sin by falling into teleological illusion, and can be corrected by means of a second model: that of the ‘new horizons’ put forward earlier by Geoffroy Atkinson.2 His paradigm has the merit of privileging – at least in theory – geographical space over chronology, the surface of expansion, by contrast with a linear historical development. This enables one to reach, in principle, the nub of the problem. Thus, Atkinson shows the relatively minor importance of the reception of the discovery of America in the Renaissance, compared to an eastern horizon of expectations whose age-old prestige was actually enhanced at the time by the peaking ascendancy of Ottoman power. The foreign reality that literally ‘obsessed’ Europe in the time of Suleiman was not that of naked Indian cannibals springing from the depths of the Brazilian jungle; it was that, close to home and yet at the same time more distant, of the Muslim Turk pitching camp and raising his crescent flag on the very doorstep of Christianity.3

Such an analysis also falls into error, however, by ignoring the question of scales. The Mediterranean space in which that confrontation between Christianity and Islam was played out – between a Europe torn by religious schism and national rivalries, and the seemingly monolithic empire of the Great Turk – had by this time ceased to be confused with global space. It was thenceforward an arbitrary distortion to place on the same level phenomena belonging to maps – world maps or mappae mundi, and chorographies of the Near East and Balkans – whose scales did not coincide. Thus, the author of the ‘New Horizons’ reproduces an illusion which Renaissance men themselves only reluctantly gave up: that of privileging the Mediterranean centre over an unknown or poorly known periphery, and of forcing fragments of the world that were disproportionate to each other to coexist within the same frame of representation.

Now savants in the sixteenth century – most notably, the historians of Venice, the city located at the very pivot between the two antagonistic cultures – began to realize this disparity of spaces (a disparity that had less to do with their ‘quality’ than with their ‘quantity’), and to take up for the modern world certain categories dear to the cosmographical science that was undergoing vigorous revival at the time. Thus two great collections of historical and juridical documents appeared within a few years of each other in the Most Serene Republic, but subdivided the world differently: not in terms of the fundamental directions of space (east and west, north and south), but according to the distances and orders of magnitude they envisaged. Between Giovanni Battista Ramusio and Francesco Sansovino, the editors respectively of Navigationi e viaggi (1550–9) and the collection Dell’historia universale de’ Turchi (1560), the boundary is to be traced not in terms of meridians, nor of any geographical lines whatsoever; since the ‘Orient’ is the object common to both enterprises. It is scale that forms the division between these two complementary collections.

Ramusio is interested in the Far East, and makes his domain the distant outside world – that of ‘navigations and voyages’, as his title explicitly indicates; whereas Sansovino devotes his documentary collection to an intermediary region, Turkey and Persia, which is posited as the precise negation of the Christian West. The distinction between the two might, therefore, seem to be one of genre, as Stéphane Yérasimos has suggested4 – distant peregrinations being opposed to a history primarily concerned with the immediate neighbourhood, to which peoples more recently discovered had no right of access. One might, too, provisionally agree with Yérasimos, that in the outline of the world offered by European humanism in the second half of the century, ‘the more geography there was, the less history.’ But this apparent distinction obscures another that, in my view, is more essential: the small scale of global representation was radically distinct from the medium or large scale appropriate to a region, be it more or less extended, of the earth. The former grasped the quantity of the world, whereas the latter plumbed its quality. A planisphere that reduced the terraqueous globe to its broad outlines did not admit of the same objects as a partial (chorographic or topographic) map swarming with a profusion of different places. A history of events, right down to the cycle of seasons, could easily enter into the latter type of map by way of a large qualitative scale that allowed one to fix accidental details, to inscribe locally the passage of the present. Thus, the gold of harvests or enamelled prairies of flowers formed part of the programme that Girolamo Cardano prescribed for the perfect chorography.5

On the other hand, the small scale of the mappa mundi lent itself ideally, in a future-oriented vein, to audacious strategic anticipations. The reduced scale of cosmography, or universal geography, seemed ideally suited both to the dreams of the navigator and to the speculations of princes or diplomats. To them it was given to ‘sculpture the azure ocean’6 – to carve in it, compass and dividers in hand, the boundaries of purely theoretical spheres of influence. In this sense, the Treaty of Tordesillas might be considered the first cosmographical act of the Renaissance. Concluded on 7 July 1494 between Portugal and Spain, and ratified by Isabel of Castille on 2 August and by John II of Portugal on 5 September, it rigidly divided the two empires by means of a meridian or ‘direct line traced from pole to pole’, set 370 leagues west of the Azores.7

For cosmography did not allow itself to be encumbered by obstacles. From the lofty position it took up it effaced all relief, and abolished every feature of the land. Indeed, its privileged field of action was doubtless that constituted by the vague and unified expanses of the oceans. But to the real configuration of the globe it was, one might say, indifferent. Given that ‘it divided the world according to the circles of the heavens’,8 and that its lines of force resulted from a projection on to the sphere of the circular movement of the stars (within, of course, the geocentric system of Ptolemy), cosmography could reign as an absolute sovereign over the terraqueous globe. It manipulated at will the natural frontiers of rivers and mountains; determined the futures of peoples by fixing their migrations and boundaries; remodelled, if necessary, the structure of continents; and controlled the calculated drift of archipelagos.9

By virtue of this future-oriented dynamism ruling over an unfinished present, cosmography was diametrically opposed to the regional detail of chorography. The latter recorded from place to place the events of the past, and made the regional map into a genuine ‘art of memory’ in the sense that classical antiquity attached to the term.10The topographer’s landscape-map was a profuse and indefinitely fragmented receptacle of local legends and traditions that were rooted in vagaries of relief, hidden in folds of terrain, and readable in toponymy and folklore; whereas the reticular and geometrical map of the cosmographer anticipated the conquests and ‘discoveries’ of the modern age. No doubt the marvellous was not absent from it; but it subsisted there only by special dispensation.

If, for example, the Le Havre pilot Guillaume Le Testu placed at the margins of the known world, in his Cosmographie universelle of 1556, monstrous populations inherited from Pliny, St Augustine and Isidore of Seville, it was only in order to establish provisional boundaries for a knowledge in a perpetual state of progress.11 ‘Progress’ means here that enlargement of a space that was pushing out on all sides and stitching together, as voyages allowed, the remaining gaps in it; rather than the linear and continuous development of a rectilinear history of knowledge.12 There was not such a great difference between the Monoculi (one-eyed men), Sciopods, Dog-heads or other Blemmyae that haunted the depths of Asia (but also reared their heads elsewhere: in the most impenetrable regions of the New World, or the fabled Southern Land), and the padrões or milestones erected by Portuguese navigators here and there on the shore to mark their progress along the African coast; for on such milestones, painted in the colours of fables, also rested the future advance of a great quest.

Having failed to take account of the differences of scale between traditional chorography and the Ptolemaic cosmography renewed by Münster and his followers, we have tended to assume an imbalance of Renaissance ‘geographical literature’ in the Orient’s favour. The result has been to confuse different orders of magnitude and, with them, spaces and objects calling for different methods of analysis.

A second error has flowed from this. Having failed to recognize the ‘cosmographic revolution’ taking place at the turn of the sixteenth century – the sudden rupture of scales that changed people’s way of viewing the world, and consequently the world itself – criticism has often remained trapped in a narrowly historicist vision of travel literature. This has resulted in an undue eagerness to sort out ‘good’ from ‘bad’ geographers, to distinguish the ‘forward-thinking’ from the ‘backward’.13

Now the chorus of insults that greeted a cosmographer like Thevet during his lifetime, as the result of a cleverly orchestrated polemic,14 mostly did not emanate from the more ‘progressive’ Renaissance writers. We find among the enemies of cosmography, alongside undoubted representatives of the ‘new historicism’ (sixteenth-century style) such as Urbain Chauveton or Lancelot Voisin de la Popelinière,15 the most rigorous exponents of the theological tradition it threatened. The Catholic ‘zealots’ Gilbert Génébrard and François de Belleforest, but also the Lutheran Ludwig Camerarius, were scandalized less by the medieval candours of Henry III’s cosmographer than by the blasphemous audacity of his undertaking.

Beyond the casual alliance his adversaries formed against him, therefore, one can ask if Thevet, far from having sinned against the truth and against his century,16 was not on the contrary being taxed with its most intrepid innovations. A case in point is the Brazilian ‘Henryville’ that Huguenots and Leaguers hotly disputed, but which was in the end nothing but a strategic fiction, a poorly understood colonial anticipation.17 A similar misunderstanding arises in connection with Thevet’s curiosity about New World cultures, his drawn-out transcription of Tupinamba cosmographical myths or his use of an Aztec codex from the beginning of the conquest period for the Amerindian iconography of his Vrais Pourtraits et Vies des hommes illustres.18

The pride and excess that his contemporaries ceaselessly stigmatized in Thevet appear, in fact, to be part and parcel of the cosmographical project. From the part to the whole, and from the eyes and ears of the world to its face (to use an ancient ‘similitude’ illustrated by Peter Apian: see plate 2), the leap from partial chorography to global cosmography involved an upward displacement of one’s point of view.19 It is incorrect to say that the observer’s view expanded; and in this sense, too, the concept of ‘new horizons’ seems somewhat imprecise. The point of view was elevated, to the point of grasping in a single instant the convexity of the terraqueous globe. At that imaginary point, the eye of the cosmographer ideally coincided with that of the Creator. Spatial hyperbole allowed this passage from the closeted world of chorography to the plenitude of a universe revealed at last in its totality.

Such a leap from the qualitative to the quantitative, and from the earth to the heavens, was not accomplished without some difficulties. A chasm lay in the path of the cosmographer who would transform himself into Lucian’s Icaromenippus. How might he embrace this totality, at the same time overflowing and lacunary, of the cosmos? How could he bridge the gap between a theoretical global vision and the millimetric apprehension of singularities that ‘natural philosophers’, as faithful inheritors of the medieval Imagines mundi, obstinately continued to gather? Furthermore (and this problem became acute during the Counter-Reformation) it was difficult for a cosmographer to escape the accusation of pride in so far as he pretended, as his profession required, to embrace with his vision and, as it were, to grasp in his hand the two extremities of the theatre of Nature: the local scale of individual experience, and the universal scale of the divine plan.

A formal submission to theology, reiterated at the beginning of each of his books, allowed Thevet to escape the suspicion of heresy which fell, by contrast, on Guillaume Postel, his friend and companion in the Levant. This caution, coupled no doubt with a basic inability to raise himself to the heights of abstraction or to penetrate the arcana of nature, caused him to despise the speculative sciences. As a pupil of the geographer Oronce Finé (Orontius Finaeus) and a friend of Antoine Mizauld and of Postel, he ignored the astrological profession, and had nothing but contempt for adepts of the Cabbala, even the Christian one.20 Similarly, two chapters of his Cosmographie universelle of 1575 sufficed to dispatch the mathematical aspect of the programme he was committed to, and he would later return to it only surreptitiously, in pages whose incoherence has been emphasized.

Being tainted with hubris, the cosmographical enterprise did not serve the aims of natural theology at all well. It would take all the efforts of Sebastian Münster and Richard Hakluyt, within the perspectives of the German and Anglican Reformations; and, later, those of Mercator and Hondius in the Low Countries of the Catholic Reconquista, to christianize a discipline that sinned by its excess of self-confidence. Only then would be affirmed the fecund tradition of ‘cosmographical meditations’ that, from Vadianus to Mercator, made the contemplation of the atlas one of the privileged means of access to an understanding of the Scriptures.

‘From the Mappe he brought me to the Bible.’21 With this startling recollection, Hakluyt describes his conversion to geography under the aegis of his cousin Richard Hakluyt the Elder, who, receiving him one day in his study, guided his reading from the planisphere to the Psalms. The commentary on a map was a spiritual exercise like any other, and it offered as well the advantage of not separating the believer’s interior reflections from his or her practical activity in the world. The admiration aroused by the spectacle of the Creation miniaturized into a map went hand in hand with an examination of the ‘commodities’ the geographical apprentice could find there. The beauty of the cosmos thus resided in its use value, and in the profit that a Christian could draw from it. Spontaneously the young Hakluyt discovered that the service of that generous God whose humble chaplain he was to be, and the design of a greater England, were the two faces of a single duty.

But there was no such liaison for Thevet. The dreams of colonial implantation that he nurtured for the France of the last Valois kings, and that he situated by turns in the Bay of Rio de Janeiro or in the St Lawrence estuary, did not at all correspond to a belief in the providential destiny of a nation. More simply, in creating forts and crenellated citadels at random on formerly savage shores he was fulfilling the offices of a dutiful courtier. His exercise of a fantastic geography pursued no other end than the Prince’s contentment, and secondarily also his own megalomaniac tastes as the ‘Cosmographer to four kings’. For want of any higher ambition or of the transcendental necessity that pervades the writings of Hakluyt, an Anglican chaplain who became a propagandist for the colonialist and Puritan lobbies in Paris and London,22 Thevet’s cosmographical fictions would remain of no political consequence. An age dogged by misfortunes and persistent civil war encountered there a dream reduced in advance to nothing by its sheer gratuitousness.

Furthermore, unlike Münster or even Mercator, who opened their Cosmography and atlas respectively with a Creation-story inspired by the biblical Genesis, Thevet broke with this tradition of marrying a profane geography to sacred history, and chose to begin ex abrupto by recalling the definitions of Ptolemy.23 Far from celebrating the wedding of Moses and Cosmography (like Martianus Capella celebrating that of Mercury and Philology), his work endlessly announces a divorce between the excesses inherent in the programme of Ptolemy and the Alexandrian school and the humility required of a Christian philosopher. Whence Thevet’s ‘blasphemies’ in relation to the Old Testament, of which he imprudently rejects fables such as Jonah’s whale, Samson’s lion or Ezekiel’s Pygmies.

The problem posed by cosmographical hyperbole was not only one of theological doctrine; it bore on method itself. Cosmography, whose rehabilitation coincided with the great discoveries, paradoxically developed at a time when the new state of the world should have shunted it into obsolescence. The earth had grown in spite of it, and the old oikoumene that the ancients had limited to a longitudinal portion of the northern hemisphere was multiplied by four.

Yet this model, apparently so inadequate, proved to be fecund by virtue of its very anachronism. It offered to modern geographers a three-quarters empty canvas, leaving them free to inscribe on it the delineation of newly ‘invented’ or discovered lands; a form, at once closed and open, full and lacunary, that represented the ideal construction in which to house, with their approximative and disparate localizations, the ‘bits’ of space that navigators brought back from their distant voyages, having summarily entered them in their rutters or portolan charts.24 As Jean Lafond notes, ‘a good model was productive in so far as it could be applied to another domain than that with which it was hitherto associated.’25

In like manner, one could argue that the continuing productivity of Ptolemaic cosmography in the Renaissance arose from the fact that the world-object was no longer what it had been in late antiquity. In relation to the reality gradually emerging from navigation on the high seas, the cosmographical model seems at once anticipatory and backward. It was backward on account of the limits it fixed for human curiosity and action, which one by one would have to be overthrown. Experience would reveal that the uninhabitability of the glacial and torrid zones was a doctrine without foundation; there was no exact symmetry between the northern and southern hemispheres, and America, drawn out in latitude, contradicted the general organization of the Old World, its division by the Mediterranean into the three riverine continents of Europe, Asia and Africa. As for the Aristotelian doctrine of progressively encased spheres of earth and water, it posed insoluble problems for the cartographer and would soon have to give way to the modern conception of a terraqueous globe.26

But it was a model that could be corrected: it was perfectible, to the extent that it largely anticipated the new state of practical knowledge. Virgin spaces subsisted on the sphere; notably around the poles, where they aroused endless speculation about the existence of a north-west passage or a southern continent. The depths of the North American or African interiors also long escaped the general enlargement of perspective and the growing extension of global economic fluxes. Thus the universe, while theoretically full, remained in practice malleable.

The inadaptation of the cosmographical model was fecund in a double and contradictory way: being at the same time experimentally backward and anticipatory in mathematical terms, it opened to Renaissance science a space in which could be played out the various national and personal projects or ‘cosmographical fictions’ referred to above. Thus the England of Ralegh and Hakluyt invented for itself a northern empire that would take half a century to realize. As for the French monarchy, it found itself endowed with an erratic New France whose basis moved, in the course of decades, from Brazil to Florida and Canada; it even came to rest for a while in the hypothetical southern land, which La Popelinière claimed, at the time of the Portuguese war of succession, for the declining Valois dynasty.

Thevet, for his part, would exploit that model; its ambitious framework, openness in principle, and internal play would leave him free to dispose of the profuse diversity of the world as he pleased. The share of initiative that devolved on to the cosmographer in the exercise of his profession was immense, though not unlimited. In effect, the prestige that it accorded to extension freed him from the old servitude to chronology. Thevet played on it (unduly, no doubt) in order to sweep away the scientific tradition whose inheritor he claimed – contradictorily – to be.

Cosmography, it will be clear, was also the project of a lifetime commitment. Before setting about an examination of Thevet’s work, it is worth sketching the broad outlines of a career that was in many ways exemplary.

He was of modest origins, a younger son of a family of surgeon-barbers in Angoulême. His parents placed him in the Franciscan convent in that town at the age of ten; and it was his religious order that would allow him to travel and accede de facto to the discipline of geography. A first ‘periplus’ took him to the Levant from 1549 to 1552. Made a Knight of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, he had to fulfil, along with his itinerary of pilgrimage, some mission of a diplomatic nature that retained him for two years in Constantinople. On returning to his convent he supervised the writing of a Cosmographie de Levant, which however owed more to the work of compilation by humanist authors than to his own memories. This work, abundantly illustrated, was published in Lyon in 1554.

The real springboard for his career as cosmographer to the kings of France was offered by a second voyage, this time to the New World, in the company of Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon, Knight of Malta.27 This adventure in ‘Antarctic France’ – that exiguous austral France founded on an islet in the bay of Rio de Janeiro – was for Thevet limited to a brief winter spent ‘among the most savage men of the universe’, from 15 November 1555 to 31 January 1556. Falling ill shortly after disembarking, he was sent home on the ship that had brought him. From this short season in the tropics, however, he would draw the material for a second book, much more topical than the previous one and destined finally to establish his fame. The Singularitez de la France Antarctique, published at the end of 1557, was translated into Italian and English, and for a long time the work was the subject of borrowings, imitations and polemical debate. The quality of its documentation of the flora, fauna and manners of the Indians of southern Brazil, and its rich illustrations, in which fantastic scenes decked out with native artefacts sat beside botanical plates devoted to the manioc, banana or pineapple plants – all assured the work a wide circulation at court and among poets and seekers of curiosities. Its depiction of an Edenic Brazil stimulated the literary rivalry of Jodelle and Jean Dorat or of Du Bellay and Ronsard, who tried to outdo each other in composing original variations on the conquests of Jason and the theme of a lost golden age and the naked liberty of our earliest forefathers.

It was following this publication that Thevet was able to realize the great ambition of his life. Released from his vows at his own request in 1559, he soon became chamberlain and then cosmographer to the king. That office seems not to have existed in France before him; perhaps he himself created it, following Spanish and Portuguese models. Its functions are vague, and its level of remuneration uncertain: Thevet would never be one of the experts in nautical science that the sovereigns of the Iberian peninsula so prized, nor a holder of state secrets such as would have made him equivalent to a minister or privy counsellor to the prince. There was in France, throughout this whole period, no coherent maritime policy; initiatives in this area came and went without any order, emanating by turns from the various hostile factions that fought for the king’s ear – sometimes from Coligny, sometimes from the Guises. Thevet’s role therefore remained, it would seem, of secondary importance. Hence the discredit that befell him even during his own lifetime, and the almost complete success of the ‘cabal of the learned’ that was formed, from the 1570s, against this autodidact who was so insolent as to pretend to a monopoly of geographical knowledge in the French kingdom.

From his association with the powerful, and notably with the Florentine entourage of Catherine de Médicis, he would nevertheless gain secret information that had some strategic value: such as that issuing from the Histoire notable de la Floride (1566) by René de Laudonnière, or from the memoirs of Roberval concerning a colonial establishment in Canada.28 But from these documents he drew nothing more than the material for impenetrable chapters that form the substance of his last works, left in manuscript: the Histoire de deux voyages aux Indes australes et occidentales, and especially the Grand Insulaire et Pilotage, an atlas with commentaries containing more than 300 charts of islands and islets all around the world.29

The fact remains that, from this time on, Thevet professed ambitions on a universal scale. It was then, once established in Paris around 1560, that he began the most controversial phase of his career and his work. His image had hitherto been that of a long-distance traveller; it was as such that his contemporaries hailed him, knew him, and sang his praises in dithyrambic odes. But to the qualities of endurance, courage and curiosity that such a role required he now claimed to join those of unlimited knowledge and perspicacity. In this new guise he courted the favours of the great, played off Catholic and Protestant noblemen, and directed from a distance an ever more vast enterprise of compilation. His contribution to the latter consisted mainly of pouring in documents that were inaccessible to anyone but himself, and of which he was often the only person to perceive the interest. Thus his collection of Americana, in which appear, beside the Codex Mendoza, fragments on the religion of the Tupinamba and the Aztecs, nourished the fourth volume of his Cosmographie universelle in 1575, and a decade later colonized the eighth part of his Vrais Pourtraits et Vies des hommes illustres. The latter opened up to heroes of the New World the gallery of personalities bequeathed by Plutarch, which was thereby enriched by the great men of his own age.

At the time when the principle of collections of voyages and related documents triumphed, cosmography became more and more obsolescent. But it remains the only model that allows us to link together the two divergent periods of Thevet’s life, and the two radically distinct strata of his work. Through it, we cease to see the tearaway experiences of his youth and his sedentary old age as contradicting each other. His accounts of his voyages to the Levant or among the man-eaters of Brazil structure the immense compilation that progressively sedimented around those two original tropisms. In order to effect a fusion between the observed and the borrowed, cosmographical fiction as practised by Thevet promoted certain dominant ideas or, if one prefers, obsessional themes: the primacy of experience over authority; the sovereignty of a universalist view enveloping in an instant the terraqueous globe; and a preference among sources for the technical and ‘popular’ writings of pilots and mariners.