Abstract
Caught between substantial domestic and local responsibilities requiring his attention in the south of France and serious national as well as international crises on the other, Michel de Montaigne sought in the accounts of the New World by Francisco Lopez de Gómara, André Thevet, and Jean de Léry not only an escape from the political and religious unrest of his time, but an instructive view of how other cultures had dealt with internal and external threats to peace and well-being.1 In recasting the work of sixteenth-century chroniclers, he does so not only using the narrative techniques of his contemporary conteurs but also from the perspective of the increasing brutality and violence on the home front. Montaigne’s two essays, “Des cannibales”, and “Des coches” have been hailed as an early appeal to cultural relativism, that is, the examination of customs within the context of the culture to which they belong.2 More precisely, Montaigne understood the conflict between personal ethics and public action.
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Notes
Critics have not ignored the aspect of play in Montaigne’s text, especially in his overemphasis on the purity of the cannibals. See Joseph R. de Lutri, “Montaigne’s ‘Des cannibales’: Invention/Experience,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 38, 1 (1976): 77–82
Gérard Defaux, “Un cannibale en haut de chausses: Montaigne, la différence et la logique d’identité,” MLN 97 (1982): 919–57
David Quint, in “A Reconsideration of Montaigne’s Des cannibales,” Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History 51, 4 (1990): 459–89.
R. S. Khare, “The Other’s Double—The Anthropologist’s Bracketed Self: Notes on Cultural Representation and Privileged Discourse,” New Literary History 23 (1992): 1–23.
Tzvetan Todorov, “The Morality of Conquest,” Diogenes 125 (1984): 89–102.
André Thevet, Les Singularités de la France antarctique que autrement nommée Amérique et de plusieurs terres et îles découvertes de notre temps par Frère André Thevet natif d’Angoulême, à Paris 1558 (Paris: Le Temps, 1982) fol. 72.
Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonders of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 95.
Francisco López de Gómara, Cortés: The Life of the Conqueror by his Secretary, trans. Lesley Byrd Simpson (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), 105.
George Hoffmann, “Anatomy of the Mass: Montaigne’s ‘Cannibals’,” PMLA 117, 2 (March 2002): 207–21
Frank Lestringant, “Montaigne, le Brésil et l’unité du genre humain,” Montaigne Studies XXII, 1–2 (2010): 9–22
André Tournon, Montaigne. La glose et l’essai (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2000), 221.
Thevet mentions cannibalism among the Scythians, but Montaigne adds mention of the Stoics and the Gauls. Daniel Martin posits that Montaigne devoted a whole essay to cannibalism in response to the Valladoid hearings in Spain, called by Charles V, in which Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda argues against Bartolomé de Las Casas on whether it was legal to wage war on the Indians in order to subjugate them before converting them to Catholicism. According to Martin, the only argument advanced by Sepúlveda which Las Casas was unable to defend was in regard to the cannibalism of the Indians. Martin contends that Montaigne takes up the argument by developing the analogy with the kings of Europe, the mange-peuples, 588. See Daniel Martin, “Cannibals and Kings: Montaigne and the Valladoid Hearings of 1550–1551,” History of European Ideas 20, 1–3 (1995): 585–90.
Jean de Léry, Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil, ed. Frank Lestringant (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1994), 366.
Jean de Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, ed. Janet Whatley (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), 127.
Frank Lestringant, Le Huguenot et le sauvage. L’Amérique et la conroverse colonial en France au temps des guerres de religion (Geneva: Droz, 2004), 206.
Andrea Frisch, in her distinguished work, The Invention of the Eyewitness: Witnessing and Testimony in Early Modern France (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 2004)
See Joel Fineman, “The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fact,” in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York/London: Routledge, 1989): 49–76.
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© 2013 Deborah N. Losse
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Losse, D.N. (2013). Rewriting Culture: Montaigne Recounts New World Ethnography. In: Montaigne and Brief Narrative Form. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137320834_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137320834_4
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