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JANET WHATLEY Une reverence reciproque: Huguenot Writing on the New World In the late sixteenth century, the struggle between Catholics and Protestants was being extended to the New World, albeit more in idea than in physical presence. Although the Protestants had been able to establish no long-term material footing in the Americas, they were fighting for an intellectual and moral influence over how the experience of discovery and expansion would be assimilated by Europe: what providential meanings would be attributed to the discovery; what values would be attached to the human lives newly encountered; how the conduct of the conquerors would be judged. (There were, of course, crucial debates within Catholicism itself as well on all these points.) I am going to discuss a small group of interrelated texts which illustrate the different kinds of meaning America was acquiring for Europe, and just how their authors were cooperating or competing in the interpretation of New World experience.' In '578, Jean de Lery, a Huguenot pastor, published the first edition of his Hislaire d'un voyage fait en la lerre du Bresil, which recounted a voyage made more than twenty years earlier. That same year, Urbain Chauveton published a Latin translation, followed by a French translation in '579, of Girolamo Benzoni's Hisloria del mondo nuovo, originally published in Venice in 1565. Lery's Brazil voyage book went through five editions in his lifetime, and the successive versions of the text reflect his awareness of other New World writing going on around him.' At the end of the third edition (1585), Lery muses on Benzoni's book and voyage. He speaks of the 'conformite entre lui et moi,' based on their common youth at the time of their travels, and on their desire to see 'ces pays de l'Indie nouvellement trouves' (p 418). Benzoni was in America for fourteen years, Lery only ten months; still, Lery is struck by another 'conformity' in their comingsand gOings: he had set forth for America just three days before Benzoni's return in September 1556. There are other links between his work and Benzoni's which are more important than their dates. It is evident by 1585 that Lery's and Benzoni's work are part of a Protestant canon. The inscription of Benzoni's work in that canon is chiefly due to the man whom Lery describes as 'mon bon et singulier ami,' Urbain Chauveton. A Huguenot militant and a vigorous UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 57, NUMBER 2, WINTER 1987/ 8 HUGUENOT WRITING ON THE NEW WORLD 271 polemicist, Chauveton added prefaces and voluminous notes to Benzoni 's text that were specifically addressed to a Protestant public; he gave the work a Calvinist orientation that guaranteed its dissemination in Reformed circles.J In his reflections of 1585 U!ry mentions an old adversary with whom he had been exchanging hostilities over several years, through the earlier versions of his text. This is Andre Thevet, 'envieux et ennemi de verite: who has cast doubt upon the authenticity of Benzoni's voyage and wants to write it off, Lery says, as a 'fable et chose supposee' (p 420). Thevet had been to Brazil shortly before Lery, in 1555, and had published a book on it soon after: Singularitez de la France antarctique (Paris, 1558). In that work and in his Cosmographie (Paris, 1575), he had reported on the same Brazilian people as had Lery.4 This adversarial relationship had been based on more than professional jealousy. Thevet's religious and political allegiances were those of the Ligue and its intransigent Catholicism; his position as chaplain to Catherine de Medici would not have endeared him to the Huguenots. In his Cosmographie Thevet had attacked the Calvinist mission of which Lery was a part; Lery, in his Brazil book, attacked Thevet for gross inaccuracy. Then, in 1584, Thevet published his Vrais pourtraits des hommes illustres. In one of these essays he delivered a counter-attack to Lery's charges of inaccuracy; in another, a portrait of Pizarro, he denounced the work of Benzoni and Chauveton. The grounds of the denunciation (I shall give the details later) were a fundamental disagreement about the Conquest: what was...

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