(Re)writing Self and Other in Early Modern French Travel Literature

(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.¹ 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.² 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 resort to scheming and plotting with several rival Amerindian peoples in order to gain direct access to the precious metals of the Appalachian Mountains, a territory held by Potanou and neighboring allies. The multiple, inconsistent alliances between the French and local tribes are further complicated by unrest within the French colony. Members of the expedition are divided among competing factions owing to disagreements over the colony's administration; the group's cohesion is also weakened by a lack of provisions and financial support from metropolitan France. Moreover, the French Protestants vie with the powerful Spanish for control of this region of Florida, a territory added to Spain's bourgeoning overseas empire by the Treaty of Tordesillas some seventy years earlier. Dubious alliances with numerous competing Amerindian tribes, disintegration of the French colony, and fierce competition with their European opponents ultimately spell defeat for the French in Florida.

The failure of Laudonnière's expeditions to the New World is largely the result of irresolute relationships between self and Other—a predicament amplified by the multiplicity of adversaries, both Amerindian and European—which result from transforming conceptions and attributions of alterity in political, religious, economic, socio-cultural, and linguistic spheres. Le Moyne's engraving thus provides a poignant example of some of the complex versions of encounters with otherness that the period's travelers confronted and that this issue's contributors analyze. The volume is devoted to studies of a variety of early modern French travel narratives and visual materials that depict encounters with alterity during a period of discovery, exploration, and colonization of lands—mostly unfamiliar—across the globe. These voyages, motivated by a number of interests from national and imperial to commercial and religious, reflect profound transformations in the early modern European human experience. The period's travelers undertook their voyages during a remarkable expansion in European consciousness from a Mediterranean world towards the eastern regions of Asia Minor, the Middle East, and Far East; westward to the New World; southerly to Africa; and, in a self-reflective gesture, towards a rapidly changing Europe. Early modern French travel writing also reveals a transformation from medieval to early modern epistemological systems and from a feudal to an imperial model of politics. Contemporary French travelers moreover broadened their theological perspectives from Roman Catholicism to additional religions emerging in sixteenth-century Europe and a broad spectrum of other faiths practiced throughout the world. These elements are reflected in the multiplicity of travels and themes addressed in the issue: depictions of monstrous beings in the New World, linguistic difference in Jerusalem and Brazil, questions of nation and empire in Asia Minor, European and Ottoman cartographic collaborations, French ethnographic accounts of...