La Renaissance au grand large: Mélanges en l'honneur de Frank Lestringant ed. by Véronique Ferrer et al. (review)

The expansive anthology of essays dedicated to French Renaissance scholar Frank Lestringant offers an array of exciting, forward-thinking, and fresh perspectives on the long-accepted canonical tradition of Renaissance and early modern humanism and its scientific, cosmological, eschatological, epistemological, and ontological knowledge. The anthology's richly diverse essays, fully meriting the title "The Renaissance at Large/at Sea," are loosely yet coherently centered around Lestringant's own illustrious corpus of studies on the Age of Discovery and narratives of the New World, in particular his work on Jean de Léry's accounts of Brazil.

Following Michel Jeanneret's poetically endearing dedication "The Deep-Sea Navigator," "Frank Lestringant: His Life, His Work" chronologically furnishes a complete compilation of Lestringant's career accomplishments and distinctions and a meticulously exhaustive bibliography of all his academic publications, spanning four decades. Any scholar referencing Lestringant's work, or any scholar of Renaissance or early modern studies broadly speaking, would benefit from this master list.

The anthology's fifty-six essays—demonstrating the sheer scope of the backgrounds and specializations of the European, North American, and international contributors who convened for this tribute—are cleverly albeit generally organized according to their subject matter into three sections, "Travels," "Spaces," and "Writing." Despite these essays' overwhelming wealth of analyses on myriad topics in literature, science, and visual art, this anthology draws its greatest strength and cohesion from the themes that cut across these three established sections, demonstrating innovation and appropriateness for modern academia's push for interdisciplinary and intersectional studies.

Numerous essays assess conceptualizations of the New World and indigenous peoples of the Americas, not only under the guise of studies on the Age of Discovery, but more importantly with an apt twenty-first-century reexamination of European contact with indigenous civilizations and of the first scarring attempts at colonialization. Jean-Claude Laborie lauds Lestringant for exploring a largely ignored aspect of sixteenth-century "history of ideas"—the entry of the New World into the "life of ideas" of the Renaissance—a field that had not previously existed, aided by Lestringant's empathetic relationship, curiosity, and "friendship" with Brazil. Andrea Daher proposes that the invention of the figure of the eloquent "Indian" who expresses his desire of Christianization and francization in his native tongue was paraded as the triumphant product of Capuchin missionary accounts from Maranhão, Brazil, in 1612. Jean-Claude Arnould reassesses François de Belleforest's recasting of Bartolomé de Las Casas's Historia de las Indias (ca. 1527), retelling cacique Enriquillo's rebellion via Jean Poleur's much later and disconnected edition from 1555. Belleforest's primary objective was no longer the discovery of a historical episode of the New World, but the production of a historical context destined to serve as counsel to Charles Quint, a prince called to restore values and political order. Andreas Motsch brilliantly comments on eight of Jesuit François du Creux's illustrations of indigenous figures' everyday activities in his Historiae Canadensis (1664). Du Creux's rhetoric reflects the renewed zeal around 1660 of the French crown and the Jesuits in their North American colonial project. Guided by current observations in the field of art history, Motsch signals that the priest engraves an image of a new France as an extension of the old France, worthy of its monarch's support and worthy before all of Christendom on account of its piety, and needing urgent defense against enemy Iroquois. The visual dimension of du Creux's illustrations calls into question their aesthetic and documentary value, prompting a renewed understanding of how an ethnographic New World iconography developed and emerged.

The celebrated literature of the sixteenth century is pioneeringly revisited through the anthology's contributors' cross-disciplinary approaches. Alexandre Tarrête affirms that Michel de Montaigne's famed Essais chapter "Des Cannibales" is not only a voyage in space...