Wonder and Science

Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe

Mary Baine Campbell

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780801489181
• eBook ISBN: 9781501705052
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Literature

During the early modern period, western Europe was transformed by the proliferation of new worlds—geographic worlds found in the voyages of discovery and conceptual and celestial worlds opened by natural philosophy, or science. The response to incredible overseas encounters and to the profound technological, religious, economic, and intellectual changes occurring in Europe was one of nearly overwhelming wonder, expressed in a rich variety of texts. In the need to manage this wonder, to harness this imaginative overabundance, Mary Baine Campbell finds both the sensational beauty of early scientific works and the beginnings of the divergence of the sciences—particularly geography, astronomy, and anthropology—from the writing of fiction. Campbell's learned and brilliantly perceptive new book analyzes a cross section of texts in which worlds were made and unmade; these texts include cosmographies, colonial reports, works of natural philosophy and natural history, fantastic voyages, exotic fictions, and confessions. Among the authors she discusses are André Thevet, Thomas Hariot, Francis Bacon, Galileo, Margaret Cavendish, and Aphra Behn. Campbell's emphasis is on developments in England and France, but she considers works in languages other than English or French which were well known in the polyglot book culture of the time. With over thirty well-chosen illustrations, Wonder and Science enhances our understanding of the culture of early modern Europe, the history of science, and the development of literary forms, including the novel and ethnography.

Part I

IMAGINATION AND DISCIPLINE

THE CHAPTERS IN PART 1 illustrate the war of impulses carried on between the times of the French traveler and cosmographer André Thevet (author of a major popular work on the New World, the Singularitez de la France Antarctique [1557]), and the methodical account by Robert Plot, the Ashmolean Museum’s first curator and Oxford’s first professor of chemistry, of a more manageable territory in his Natural History of Oxfordshire (1677). From “Singularities” to “Natural History,” the century saw an effortful transformation of epistemological methods and tastes throughout western Europe.

Thevet’s large, exuberant, increasingly imaginary representations of worlds apart, especially the Americas, meet a kind of comeuppance in the chaste and technically accurate account of the mathematician and colonial investor Thomas Hariot; Hariot’s ethnographically tilted Briefe and true report of the New-found land of Virginia (1588) still commands respect from ethnohistorians, while Thevet gets called a liar. In Thevet, on the one hand, we can see early stirrings of the all-consuming first-person narrator (already glimpsed in the narratives of Columbus and Cabeza de Vaca) that will come home to roost in the bourgeois novel. In Hariot, on the other hand, we have an instance of the more easily credited and utilitarian “author-evacuated” delivery of an ethnographically present-tense local culture. Hariot’s approach will blossom eventually as a fieldwork-based ethnology, fully visible in Father Joseph Lafitau’s 1724 masterpiece of comparative ethnology, the Moeurs des sauvages amériquains. What is jettisoned from Thevet’s approach to other worlds will gradually be converted to the uses of writers who look for imaginative opportunity as opposed to the management of knowledge (consider the equally well-traveled Lemuel Gulliver).

The divisions of labor and conflicts of desire represented in this dynamic belong to the larger story once anachronistically conceived as the “Scientific Revolution.” With conscious clarity and institutionalizing fervor, natural philosophers (there were no “scientists” yet to revolve), such as Francis Bacon, René Descartes, and the smaller fry who catalogued and categorized, took it upon themselves to bring rigorous method to the information explosion of their times. Chapter 3 examines some of the manifestoes and exemplars of the new mode, with its impulse of expurgation as well as of expansion. Bacon comes first, as the most influential of the expurgators, as well as one of the most resonant and beautiful writers among them; he knew well what powerful pleasures he was rejecting in his program of philosophical renewal and purification. The chapter ends with Plot’s dutiful attempt to put his idol Bacon’s prescriptions to work, on a local culture less challenging than Hariot’s Algonquin “Virginia.”

By the time of Plot’s Natural History, Descartes and Bacon have come and gone, Gresham College has been founded — as well as the Académie des Sciences in Paris, the Royal Society in London, the Accademia del Cimento in Florence, and several others. Public museums exist, scientific journals are published in vernacular languages, herb-women and out-of-work soldiers act as research assistants to the scientific virtuosi (see Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 73), and “arts” such as chemistry and geography are taught in the universities (see Phyllis Allen). Religious authority has been questioned at gunpoint by the wars that wracked Europe; in England a divinely anointed king has been beheaded and replaced by a commoner. The political and especially the commercial structures of most western European nations have adapted to the expansion of colonialist enterprise, the traffic in slaves has more than tripled since Thevet’s time, and most of a transformation in intellectual culture has taken place.

My purpose in Part 1 is to characterize that transformation by examining some crucial world-ordering texts, not to hypothesize its causes, which are the material of social and economic history. It is a transformation that brings the literary culture of western Europe much closer to the individuated, divided relation it now has with the “disciplines” of the sciences. But along the way of change are visible many a strange hybrid and wonder­ridden testimony.

II ● TRAVEL WRITING AND ETHNOGRAPHIC PLEASURE

André Thevet and America, Part I

For things whereof the perfect knowledge is taken away from us by antiquity, must be described in history, as geographers in their maps describe those countries whereof as yet there is made no true discovery; that is, either by leaving some part blank, or by inserting the land of pigmies. . . . To which purpose I remember a pretty jest of Don Pedro de Sarmiento, a worthy Spanish gentleman, who had been employed by his king in planting a colony upon the straits of Magellan: for when I asked him, being then my prisoner, some questions about an island in those straits, which methought might have done either benefit or displeasure to his enterprise, he told me merrily that it was to be called the Painter’s Wife’s Island; saying, that whilst the fellow drew that map, his wife sitting by desired him to put in one country for her, that she, in imagination, might have an island of her own.

—Walter Ralegh, History of the World (1614)

WRITERS ADORE A VACUUM. During the long period covered by this book “science” was mostly still being written by writers, only some of them writing as scientists (a word not invented till the 1840s); this is true especially for the kind of material later to be codified as ethnographic, under the aegis of the science of anthropology. As any number of recent works have demonstrated, the “New World” in the sixteenth century provided a writerly occasion second to none, unless perhaps to that of the “new heaven” emerging simultaneously from a more sedentary exploration. Ethnohistorians now often look to sixteenth-century texts for information in their attempts to form an accurate picture of the American histories and social structures fatally interrupted during what they call the “contact period,” but these texts were produced in answer to a complex of desires and needs less regulated and less utilitarian than is the average modern ethnography. Indeed, some of the desires spoken to by books such as André Thevet’s or Theodor de Bry’s America are much more like those of the Painter’s Wife than those of Ralegh; I will focus here on the part such desires had to play in the forging of a textual New World for European readers.1

In this chapter I look at the relations of ethnology and fictional narrative in some books written before the successful establishment of French and English settler colonies in the New World—before, that is, the geographer’s map became too crowded with verifiable place names to bear the insertion of “the land of the pigmies.” I look mainly at the major works of the traveler André Thevet, a Dominican friar and the Royal Cosmographer of France for most of the second half of the sixteenth century, and more briefly at America, Part I (1590), the famous collaboration of the English scientist and colonialist Thomas Hariot with the painter John White and the Dutch Protestant engraver and publisher Theodor de Bry.

PLEASURE

Sixteenth-century travel accounts such as these bear the mark of “discoveries” not only personal and scientific but fully, globally, political. They constitute at once the origins of the modern science of ethnology and the textual justification of several governments’ policies of colonial appropriation. That the developments of colonial empire and prose fiction were also chronologically parallel is in itself evidence of nothing (since the emergence of the printing press and commercial publishing were simultaneous with the marked increase in quantity and sophistication of prose fiction), but I think that in fact there are significant connections to be made. The salient factor common to these and other sequelae of national consolidation and expansion during the early modern period might be formulated most generally as pleasure.

But “pleasure” is an unwieldy category—as is for that matter “travel writing,” which for our purposes will have to include any ethnographic writing (no matter how fraudulent) grounded in personal experience. We will be interested in several specific forms of delight, wonder, frisson, satisfaction, existing as objects of demand in a suddenly expanded marketplace and also as aesthetic effects reliably, characteristically, available in a number of representational genres. Ex cathedra, Michel de Certeau pronounces, “What travel literature really fabricates is the primitive as a body of pleasure” (“Ethno-Graphy,” 226); Marianna Torgovnik’s recent meditations on Malinowski’s field diaries (Gone Primitive) substantiate this claim for modern ethnography. I have been thinking about the pleasure not only of the producer but of the reader or consumer, and in relation to texts from the predawn of ethnography. The pleasure of looking, whether at subjugated naked women on a tropical isle or at elegant engravings in an expensive illustrated book, was, in the sixteenth century, a pleasure on the march. To what pain did it correspond? What profit did it serve?

Most of the pleasures Freud discusses in Civilization and Its Discontents function anaesthetically, as forms of escape from the suffering inflicted by “all the regulations of the universe” (76); the last form he brings up before psychosis and religion is the creation and enjoyment of “art,” “making oneself independent of the external world, by looking for happiness in the inner things of the mind.” “As a goal of life,” he says of the enjoyment of beauty (whose sources are scientific and “natural” as well as “artistic”), “this aesthetic attitude . . . offers little protection against the threat of suffering, but it can compensate for a great deal” (82). He complains a few sentences farther on of the mysteriousness of beauty’s function: “Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it” (82). Like Darwin, Freud gives up on the question of beauty’s function, which I cannot answer either, posed at such a high level of generality. But if we draw it closer to the grimy context of imperialist expansion under capitalism, it is rather less of a conundrum. Beauty is, among other essences, the attribute that desire projects on what it is pleased to consume, and the production of desire and consumption are prerequisites to the growth of markets.

The most obvious case among sixteenth-century literatures of mixing business with pleasure—colonial business, erotic pleasure—is that of Hariot’s inventory of Virginian “commodities” (including Algonquin people and their customs), illustrated by White (later Governor of the Roanoke colony), and engraved and published by de Bry as the first volume of America, a series of proto-ethnographic illustrated travel accounts that began the series of series, the Grands voyages, (1590–1634). Before the inauguration of de Bry’s Great Voyages, the most important sixteenth-century illustrated texts containing ethnographic data and composed by European observers are Fernández de Oviedo’s Historia general de las Indias (Seville, 1535; composed in Mexico), Hans von Staden’s account of his captivity among the “cannibals” of Brazil (Warhafftige Historia und beschriebung einer landtschafft der Wilden . . . [Marpurg, 1557]), Thevet’s Singularitez de la France antarctique (Paris, 1557) and Cosmographie universelle (Paris, 1575), Jean de Léry’s account (written partly in angry response to Thevet’s works) of his experience in Brazil, the Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Brézil (La Rochelle, 1578), and Girolamo Benzoni’s Historia del mondo nuevo (Venice, 1565).2 These commodities offered for sale all over Europe and regularly translated are important, not only to reenvisioning the early history of ethnography, but to understanding the history of reading for pleasure—a history which must include novellas, prose romances, voyages (real and imaginary), cosmographies and natural histories alongside the more commonly studied history, poetry, and philosophy favored by humanists.3 (The gentleman-scholar John Morris’s library, to take a random instance, included individual voyage accounts by Léry, Marc Lescarbot, Samuel de Champlain, and Thomas Gage, as well as Strabo’s Geographia and Ramusio’s Viaggi, the rough Italian equivalent of Richard Hakluyt’s Voyages.)4

Both Thevet’s and de Bry’s publications exploit the potential of “manners and customs” for providing (to writer and artist as well as reader) erotic and narcissistic pleasure. But Hariot’s written text, in its antinarrative, taxonomic, and utilitarian rhetoric, points the way toward a scientific discourse in which authority will ultimately derive from experience verifiable because repeatable (the historical dimension of human life and lives will have to be left out). Though he bases his authority on witnessing, Thevet’s experiences are likely to be repeated only in the imaginations of his readers (and are more often than not themselves repeated from the texts of other voyagers and cosmographers). The “knowledge” expressed in his works tends to be rather a representation or imitation of knowledge, as the novel imitates “true history.” For Thevet, native Americans are frissons, topoi, characters—a medium for the textual rhythms of his dynamic, associative consciousness—and the function of his books is to articulate settings for the imaginary adventures of well-to-do and leisured readers.

In discussing Thevet I will be looking most closely at the kinds of private satisfaction provided by the cosmographies of the unscrupulous climber, “un homme nouveau,” as Frank Lestringant labels him in his definitive study (André Thevet [1991]). But the notoriety and vendibility of Thevet’s work suggest these pleasures added up to a mass phenomenon, with implications for the social as well as the strictly literary history of reading. To quote Freud one last time on the subject of (an)aesthetic pleasure:

Another procedure [of securing happiness] . . . regards reality as th...

Table of contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• I Introduction
• PART I IMAGINATION AND DISCIPLINE
• PART II: ALTERNATIVE WORLDS
• PART III THE ARTS OF ANTHROPOLOGY
• Coda: The Wild Child
• Works Cited