“L'Humanité du tout perdue?”: Early Modern Monsters, Cannibals and Human Souls

Abstract

This essay revisits familiar figures—the cannibal and the monster—in the works of Columbus, Jean de Lery, Montaigne and Shakespeare, which gives a better glimpse of what remains of the “human” in the insistently conflictual contexts of early modern encounter. Setting the texts of these "founding fathers" of modern European ethnography alongside other, contemporary narratives of encounter allows us to recognise how the monster and the cannibal function as privileged figures in the once colonial and cross-confessional discourses of novelty, travel, trade and cultural change across this period. It also enables us to gain a clearer sense of the more urgent argument conducted in these texts: concerning how we come to recognise others, and ourselves, as (having lost all sense of what makes us) “human”.

Keywords:

• Cannibal, Monster
• Columbus
• Jean de Léry
• Montaigne
• Shakespeare
• the “Human”
• Early Modern Encounter
• Ethnology
• Witness
• Ethnography

Notes

All translations from the French in what follows are, unless otherwise indicated, mine. Capitaine Bruneau de Rivedoux, Histoire veritable de certains voyages perilleux et hasardeux sur la mer, ausquels reluit la justice de Dieu sur les uns et sa misericorde sur les autres (Niort: Thomas Portau, 1599). A second edition, with the accompanying paratextual material suppressed, and an attribution to one Capitaine I.P.T (rather than Rivedoux), was published by Jean Osmont in Rouen a year later. For more details, see Guéguen's useful edition (Rivedoux 1996) and Guéguen (1997).

Jean de Léry, Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil [1578] (1994); for the translation, see Léry (1990). For more on Thevet, the French context and the cultural and political history of the figure of Cannibal, see Lestringant's ground-breaking studies (1990, 1991, 1994, 1996, 1997).

Hans Staden, Warhaftige Historia und beschreibung eyner Landtschafft der Wilden Nacketen, Grimmigen Menschfresser-Leuthen in der Newenwelt America gelegen (True Story and Description of a Country of Wild, Naked, Grim, Man-eating People in the New World, America) [1557]; the best modern edition is Staden (2008); for a spirited account of Staden's context and reception, see Forsyth (1985). For more on Turquet de Mayerne, see Harley (1994).

For more on early modern “autopsy” and its relation to both legal and confessional argument, see Frisch (2004) and Williams (2009); for a more sustained discussion of both the natural historical and the confessional/medical history of monsters, see Williams (2011).

See Lucian of Samostata (1913), True Story; Lucian's narrative was well known in the Renaissance. For a clear sense of how “Protestant truth” can be adapted both for polemical purposes and in response to the commercial imperatives of publishing, see Van Groesen (2008). For more on the early printed iconography of cannibalism see Gewecke (1986) and Davies (2009) and her forthcoming book, provisionally entitled Amerindian Peoples on European Maps and the Construction of Ethnographic Knowledge, 1492–1650.

For more on the “human”, see the essay by Whitehead in this collection; this is also a key theme in Williams (2011), most specifically Chapter Five.

I quote Columbus in translation from Hulme and Whitehead's excellent collection, Wild Majesty (1992).

Ibid; see Miranda: “O wonder!/How many goodly creatures are there here!/How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world/That has such people in't.” Shakespeare, The Tempest V. i. 181–4. We return to The Tempest in detail below.

For pointers to a now well-ploughed field, see Gliozzi (1976), Pagden (1982), Todorov (1984), Hulme (1986), Campbell (1988), Greenblatt (1991), Neuber (1991), Grafton et al. (1992), Harbsmeier (1994), Obermeier (2000) and Rubiés (2007).

Hulme (1986: 43) here over-simplifies things.

Much has been written about the distinction between wild, ferocious, cannibal Caribs and peaceful agrarian Arawaks—differences that reply in strange ways to those between the “normands” and “poitevins” in the narratives of Rivedoux (Staden, Léry and others); for a critique, see Hulme (1986); and for a conspectus of sorts, see Boucher (1992). See also Whitehead's note on the “inhumanity” of the Normans in Staden (2008: xxxii).

Greenblatt (1991: 53–85) is especially good on the suspenseful aspects of Columbus’ writing in relation to what he calls “the discourse of the marvelous.”

The clearest introduction to the play's pre-history (and its afterlife) remains Hulme and Sherman (2000).

The scholarship on Montaigne and the New World is vast. Todorov (1984: 32–43; 264–70), is disappointing; far better are Lestringant and Gomez-Géraud (1991), Quint (1998), Jeanneret (1989) and Hoffman (2002) (this latter also has an excellent). See also Wiggins (2006) and Williams (2006).

See Whitehead's finely tuned comments on this triad in Staden (2008: xxxi).

The embedded page reference to Montaigne here is to the 1603 edition of Florio's translation of the Essays.

For more on this see Whatley (1984).

I intend the term here both in its common-sense meaning as “point of conflict”, and, given the conflictual context and Léry's testimonial position, in the particular sense given to it by Lyotard. See, for instance: “I would call a differend the case where the plantiff is divested of the means to argue and becomes for that reason a victim. If the addressor, the addressee and the sense of the testimony are neutralized, everything takes place as if there were no damages. A case of differend between two parties takes place when the regulation of the conflict that opposes them is done in the idiom of one of the parties while the wrong suffered by the other is not signified in that idiom” (Lyotard 1988: 9).