The Discovery of America and European Renaissance Literature

The Discovery of America and European Renaissance Literature Author(s): Percy G. Adams Source: Comparative Literature Studies, Vol.
13, No. 2, Special Bicentennial Issue: American Literature in World Opinion (Jun., 1976), pp. 100-115 Published by: Penn State University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40241808 . Accessed: 17/02/2014 13:24
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The Discoveryof America and European RenaissanceLiterature

PERCY G. ADAMS
ABSTRACT Any study of the effect of the discovery of the New World is complicated by many factors - that world's changing image, true reports competing with false ones and with legends, the geographical position occupied in America by a particular European country, the biases of a nation or of a visitor or a commentator. Nevertheless, the discovery and resulting exploration did affect every important theme in Renaissance literature. Besides the best known of these themes - the Noble Savage and Earthly Paradise - it gave rise to the theme of "Spanish Cruelty," first exposed by Spain itself and then eagerly adopted by, say, England and France, and gave great impetus to the theme of progress, found not only among thinkers from Vives to Bodin but among writers of belles lettres from Torres Naharro to Ronsard to Bacon and Jonson. Every literary genre also showed the effect of growing information about and interest in America, from lyric poets like Ronsard and Donne, to embarkation ode and sermon writers, to satirists like Brant with his Narrenschiff. Then there are the romances that inspired exploration and borrowed marvels from America; the epics like Ercilla's; the travel and pseudotravel books; and the Utopias. While it may be true thatin the Renaissance more books were still being written about Europe and the ancients, the New World began to stir imaginations and inspire the best of writers. Of many conclusions drawn from a condensed study, one is that while America inspired so much literature, in whole or in part, its exploration and its culture, even in the Renaissance, were also inspired by that literature. (PGA)
There is great danger in talking about the "Renaissance," almost as much danger as there is in using other such terms - "Classicism,""Romanticism," "Baroque." Tags are neat but they are constricting and, ultimately, confusing. Haydn's fine study has suggested that to avoid a "doctrinaireapproach"1 we can demonstrate the diversity of the period by speaking of a Renaissance and then of a Counter-Renaissance.But while two categories may be more acceptable than one, the thesis depends on leaving the so-called backward-looking"Classicists"in the "Renaissance"and placing the reforming "Romanticists" in the "CounterRenaissance," Calvin and Machiavellilying side by side in the counter camp. And so, having redefined by employing definitions that are themselves "doctrinaire"and, today, almost useless - witness Donald Greene on "Neo-Classicism"- we are back to our problem. Fortunately, we need not define but can simply agree that we are concerned with the literature of Europe at a period in time extending from the discovery of the New Worldin the West to about the middle of the seventeenth century. But we are to discuss not only the literature of the Renaissance;but
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LITERATURE AND DISCOVERY
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also that New Worldin the West. And, no doubt, to define that Worldis even harderthan to define the Renaissance - for many reasons. First, just as the Renaissance changed its countenance with time, so its knowledge of the Americas altered with every newly returned ship and every freshly written account, from the oftpublished letters of Columbus and Vespucci to Raleigh and Van Noort, and from great collections such as Montalboddo's and in 1507 to Acosta and De Bry at the end of the Waldseemiiller's sixteenth century.2 And, with changing information, maps were altered each decade; terrestrialglobes replaced celestial globes; places and place names came and went, expanded or contracted. Second, each part of Europe had its writers and its time for learning.The Italians and the Spanish, for example, were quick with their books while the English were notoriously late in sailing or publishing. Third, the Spanish New Worldexisted from Florida south; France ended in the late sixteenth century with its New World in Canada,while England only after 1580 cornered its Virginia and New England. Thus, because of different climatic conditions, kinds of people encountered, fur-seekingin Canadaand gold-seeking in South America, the extended and heavy impact of Spanish culture on its possessions as opposed to a shorter and smaller impact in North America - because of many factors, then, each empireseeking nation received its particularimage with the use of the term "New World." Fourth, since the Old World civilization and the New World peoples at first found it impossible to communicate with each other, not only, for example, do reports of the Conquistadoresof South and North America conflict but they often show how the natives, out of fear, told not the truth but what the threatening Europeans wanted to hear. Because, fifth, Europe brought much of its own image and bias with its soldiers and priests who crossed the Atlantic. Over and over it has been shown how Europe searched for, or found to its satisfaction, the TerrestrialParadise,Atlantis, Ophir, even PresterJohn.3 And there were other marvelstransplantedor invented, from interpretations of Indian religion to fantastic natural facts such as Pigafetta's Patagoniangiants, David Ingram'selephants in North America, or John Hawkins' Florida unicorn.4 Sixth, the image of the New World was not only constantly changing and corrupted by its reporters, but various conflicting traditions grew up depending on whom one read - translators, for example, often blatantly altered facts that may or may not have been right to begin with. There was, for example, what Levin calls "the moral ambivalence of the golden lure" in the search for
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES
Paradisein the West,5 or the double myth about the indigenes of the Indies - one, that he was a Noble Savage, the other that he was sub-humanand should be enslaved or exterminated. One example of intended mistranslationis the renderingof the Spanish physician Nicolas Monardes (1569-71) by John Frampton/5 who left the impression that all plants in the New Worldwere health-givingand that henceforth there would be a cure for every physical ill; another is that of the zealous Hakluyt and his treatment of the account of De Soto's expedition as written by the Portuguese Gentleman of Elvas.7 Seventh, and last, there were the Renaissance pictures of the people of the New World and there were the people themselves brought back to be displayed. Nearly every sixteenth-century collection or summary of voyages had certain illustrations - gigantic warriorsbending Greek bows, nude nymphs, Europeanized landscapes. The eyewitness drawingsby John White and Le Moyne were placed in De Bry in 1590 and thereafter became the bases for idealized pictures which gave the Indians the appearance and nature of ancient Greeks or Spartans.8 Such pictures did not always conform to the appearance of the real natives who were sometimes seen in Europe - almost every voyager to the New Worldtreacherously captured one or more to bring back as slaves, to be presented to Frobisher'sHenry VII or Ribaud's Queen, to be Europeanized, to dance on village greens on feast days, to die far from home.9 It was, then, a changing, distorted, paradoxical New Worldwhich entered and affected Renaissance literature. To suggest the extent of that influence, let us look at two important literary themes and then sample the various literary genres. Avoiding the Noble Savage, Paradise,and certain other themes so often and sometimes so beautifully handled by recent writers,10 let us turn first to the theme of the Cruelty of the Spaniardsin the New World. From the earliest discoveries in the West Indies, greed for Westerngold and condescension toward Indian "ignorance"of its value led to demands impossible to fulfill, bloody retaliations by the natives, and the rise of the extreme form of that "anti" image of the New World man as impossible to Christianizeor civilize; that is, the judgment stated by Dr. Chanca on Columbus's second voyage, "their degradation is greater than that of any beast."11 But also, from the very beginning, there was a vigorous defense of the natives and an attack on their mistreatment oy the Spaniards,all coming of course from Spain itself. After Montesinos' famous sermon of 1511 defending the Indians, the transplanted Italian Pietro Martire12over and over asserted that certain of them "seeme to live in the goulden worlde," and he openly and shamefacedly condemned atrocities such as those of that butcher governor of Panama, Pedro Arias de Avila. When the debate grew heated over the nature of the Indians, with writers like
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Ovie'doand Quevdo proving their sub-humannature by resorting to Aristotle,13 Bartolom de las Casas came forward and, from about 1519 to his death, remained the chief spokesman against Spanish mistreatment. At least in theory his campaign won out, for in 1537 Pope Paul Ill's famous Bull made the Indians officially human, and in 155253 Las Casaswas able to publish tracts which were not only inflammatory and exaggeratedbut which went all over Europe to give comfort and aid to Spain's political and religious enemies. In spite of the fact that saintly Spanish priests devoted their lives to the Americans, in spite of the fact that debates between Las Casasand Sepulveda inspired "admirablelaws,"14 in spite of the fact that Spain led the way in exposing its own sins, the myth of Spanish cruelty in the New World became one of the strongest myths in history.15 But that cruelty, of whatever amount, had been reported and other nations, especially England and France, adopted it with enthusiasm. As a theme in Renaissance literature, it is reflected best in the drama, which became so important in Europe only after Las Casasand his words were well known everywhere, and since England and Spain were rivals in producing good drama as well as good navigators,their plays expose the cruelty most often. The first to do so apparently came less than five years after Las Casas'fiery pamphlets in 1557 in Toledo. It was called Las Cortes de la Muerte (The Assembly of Death) and is a kind of morality play in which the body is a character,angels are personified, and the author laments Spanish lust for gold and the resulting cruel treatment of innocent Indians.16Also in the morality tradition is Lope de Vega's well known El Nuevo Mundo descubierto por Colon, in which, along with Columbus and Indians, Providence, Idolatry, Religion, and the Devil argue as charactersthe rights and wrongs, the advantagesand disadvantagesof the discovery of America. But, as in a great number of his plays which deal with America, Lope's El Nuevo Mundo reflects his pride in Spanish conquests and colonizing achievements even as it laments the evil that went with the good, a fact true also of Tirso de Molina's patriotic trilogy about the Pizarros.17 No English dramatistsor poets, however, and there were many who dealt with the theme, found the good. Thomas Heywood in at least three plays, including // You Know Not Me, You Know no bodie (1605), made the Spanish "tyrannous, cruel, lascivious,"18 while Robert Greene in Spanish Masquerado(1589), inspired by the destruction of the Armada and finding evidence not only in Las Casasbut in Castanheda'saccount of De Soto's expedition, showed the Spanish hunting Indians with dogs, cutting off their hands, tearing them with horses.19 It was a theme often found in England outside the drama, of course, as in John Donne's simile:
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And if they stand arm'd with seely honestie, With wishing prayers and neat integritie, Like Indians 'gainst Spanish hosts they be. 20
The best known of all English treatments of the theme is surely Davenant's "opera" The Cruelty of the Spaniardsin Peru (1658), written two years after what is perhaps the most famous of all translations of Las Casas, that by Milton's nephew John Phillips.21By Davenant's time, the cruelty of the Spaniardswas being regularly contrasted with the kindness and humanity of the French, like Cartier and Champlain,or the good Protestant English, even after Puritan atrocities in New England and after the horrible aftermath of the 1622 massacrein Virginia. So Davenant not only has a spurious history of the Incas in his spectacle but concludes his conglomerate of speeches, songs, dances, and acrobatics with English soldiers heroically arrivingto save the natives of Mexico from the villainous Corts. By the time of Descartes and the Restoration of CharlesII, then, such pieces of literature had helped advertise to Europe outside the Iberian peninsula the horrorsof Spanish conquest and colonization. A second theme, much more subtle, is that of the New World's possible influence on the doctrine of progress.In spite of the argument in J.B. Bury's seminal book leading to his thesis that the idea of progressreally begins only with Descartes,22the more one reads Renaissance writers the more one agrees with Hans Baron and others23 that Humanism did not slavishly follow the Greeks and Romans but, inspired by the ancient greats, took pride in its own accomplishments and looked forward to still greater ones. At any rate, the notion of progressis obviously closely linked with the Quarrelof the Ancients and Moderns and with the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, the former often considered late seventeenth-century, the other often considered distinctively American. It is provocative to see how the New World, discovered simultaneously with ancient thought and letters, gave gigantic impetus to this complex of theories found everywhere in literature. Very early in the sixteenth century, the discovery of America became a symbol of discovery and invention in general as well as evidence to historians of the New Worldthat their age had made advances over former ages. Pietro Martire(1533) is only one such early historian to point out that the ancients knew nothing, "as we do," of the New World.24Another, Gomara (1552), expressed pride in the way Spain had "improved" her colonies25 and more than once announced that the moderns had gone beyond the Greeks and Romans; Granada(1582) pointed out that "in new lands there are discovered daily new animals with new abilities and properties, such as have never been known . . .,"26 a thesis supported by his predecessor, the physician Monardes,and even more vigorously by Monardes'
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translator, Frampton. The Inca Garcilaso (1609) not only defined three distinct stages of development in the history of his people but proudly asserted that the exploits of De Soto surpassedthose of the ancients.27 With countless witnesses such as these, one can see why sixteenth-century geographers,philosophers, and readers scorned the ancient and once honored Ptolemy as each new map showed him ever more wrong or why they attacked Aristotle long before Bacon did. The intellectual leaders of the sixteenth century knew and were impressedby America and what it meant. It would be easy to demonstrate that More, Erasmus,and other Humanists, as well as reformers like Luther, believed in progress,but it is appropriate here to start with that much admired friend of Erasmusand More,Juan Luis Vives. Close to great geographicalas well as philosophical developments, the SpaniardVives praised the giants of antiquity, but, he said, "they were men as we are, and were liable to be deceived and to err."28Furthermore,the ancients, he asserted, knew that future ages would rise to heights they did not know, for they "judged it to be of the very essence of the human race that, daily, it should progressin arts, discipline, virtue and goodness."29 Even more influential throughout Europe was Jean Bodin, closely followed by his contemporary disciple Le Roy. Bodin, in more than one book, rejected all golden ages and the theory of man's degeneration and ended by showing that his age had not only invented gunpowder, the compass, and printing but also discovered new worlds and circumnavigatedthe globed Preceded by thinkers like these and praisingwith so many of his immediate ancestors the geographical discoveries as well as the three wonderful inventions of the previous hundred years, Bacon developed out of Bruno the then striking theory that the moderns are the true ancients because they are the result of the aging of creativity and experience. And not only like the others was Bacon impressed with the opening up of a New Worldby means of the compass and gunpowder; he echoed Acosta in believing the Andes taller than any Old World mountains,31 praisedSpain's far-sightedactivity in developing its dominions, pointed out that the Aztecs and Incas were examples of progress in America,32 and, exactly like Bruno and others, compared his own bent to intellectual discovery with the great discovery of Columbus.33 With such New World historians and Old Worldthinkers to inspire them, belletristic writers of the Renaissance everywhere reflect the idea of progressand the worth of the moderns, some referring to the New Worlddirectly or to the theories of thinkers influenced by the New World. Even as Magellanwas sailing through his Strait, Torres Naharro (1517) was comparinghis new book to a ship setting sail to discover new worlds.34Just as Du Bellay's famous
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Dfense (1549) is nothing if not an illustration of a belief in progress, his friend Ronsard, who often turned to America for image and theme,35 believed with their friend Le Roy in some kind of forward movement in a designed world - 'Toute chose a sa fin et tend a quelque bt" ("Hymne de Yt"). Across the Channel and a bit later, Spenser, like his teacher Ronsard, employed the New World in image and metaphor and believed in "a goal of perfection."36 But when, inconsistently, he argued in the "Mutabilitie" cantos that Nature had arrangedall things neatly only to have Mutabilitie come along and destroy the order, his friend Hervey wrote that famous letter reprimandinghim for such a philosophy because "Nature herself is changeable"and, Hervey said, because Jean Bodin was right in believing the present better than the past. One of the best examples of a great Renaissance creative writer's belief in progressis Ben Jonson, whose Timber;or Discoveries shows how closely he depended on the Vives passageswe started with. The entire subject needs another book-length study, one that would relate Progressand the Ancient -Moderndebate to the theory of Manifest Destiny. For just as the Spanish believed they were the race chosen to improve, Christianize,and profit from the New World, as holy papal bulls even agreed, so French and English believed they were not just building empires in America but following a vision, carryingout a mandate from God or his earthly representative.37 Early in the sixteenth century, the Spanish Humanist Perez de Oliva saw a westward course of empire with Spain as God's agent,38 Edward Hayes, with Gilbert in Newfoundland, argued that "God had reserved" the New Worldnorth of Florida "to be reduced unto Christiancivilitie by the English nation," a belief held later by many early colonizers of Virginia.3*Even John Donne, in spite of all his poems on the decay of man or of the loved one, preached that famous send-off sermon in 1622 in which he told the prospective colonists that they were leaving to make "this island ... a bridge, a gallery to the new [World]."40 Such visions of a Passageto India, whether derived from good or evil or mixed motives, led smoothly to Jefferson's westward-lookingeyes and Monroe's manifesto. There are countless such themes given impetus by news out of the New Worldthat could be traced through European literature, but let us also try the great literary genres, although we can pass over dramalate starting and already mentioned - and most lyric poetry, which, especially from the Plaide to Dryden's "Ode to Charleton," has so many allusions to and metaphors depending on a knowledge of the New World.41There are, however, two types of lyric poems uniquely related to America - the promotion poems like Drayton's famous Ode and the Bon Voyage or "puffing" poems such as those of Ronsard, de Baf, and Jodelle for Thevet's book on America, and Chapman's
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for Keymis on his expedition to Guiana.42There is also a whole body of satiricalliterature inspired by new geographicaldiscoveries, from Brant'sNarrenschiff (1494) to the Elizabethan play EastwardHo! to Bishop Hall's ridicule of lying travelers.43Yet another genre is the dialogue or colloquy, important in university training and high on the best seller lists.44 Erasmus,easily the great name here, more than once turned to the New World for inspiration, as in "The Well-to-do Beggars,"where the conversation dwells on cultural relativismby way of comparing naked Americans with clothed Europeans.45There are other genres that need more attention, however. One of these is the prose romance. The relation between the romance and the exploration of the New World is both complex and intriguingbecause the influence went west as well as east. Until the time of Don Quixote, Spain, even more than other countries, avidly read these romances and was inspired to seek the marvels described in them. The popularity of Amadis and Palmerin from 1508 on paralleledthe popularity of the letters of Columbus and Vespucci or the Decades of Martire,and just as the romances told of giants, Amazons, dwarfs, Seven Cities, El Dorados, or fountains of youth, the "real"accounts brought back stories of giants, golden idols, and enchanted places mas alia. The educated Corts read Amadis to his soldiers around the campfire, Spaniardswere easily persuaded to join expeditions to an America that might be the ideal land for valorous action as well as rich treasure, and descriptions of Mexico City or Peru sent home to Spain often sounded like the literary romances themselves. Irving Leonard46has told the story well, concentrating on early reports about islands of Amazons and on Caravajal's record of Orellana'svoyage down the great river named for the women warriorshe had to fight. In 1510 Montalvo published the fifth volume of his Amadis cycle, which was named Sergasde Esplandidnand went through six Spanish editions during the century. In it is told the story of Calafia, queen of a race of Amazons who reside on a craggy island named " 'California,'" celebrated for "its abundance of gold and jewels."47 All of this literature,but none more than Esplandidn, had an incalculable influence on the exploits of Cortes and the Pizarros.For example, Corts' fourth letter to the King tells how an expedition he sent out looking for Amazons and gold returned with the exciting news that ten days beyond their stopping point, the soldiers were told, there was an island rich in treasureand inhabited by women. This "island," or one like it, decorates most maps of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for not until after 1700 were cartographersfinally convinced that lower Californiawas a peninsula.48 Closely related to the romance, especially in the Renaissance,
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is the epic, and while it has often been remarkedthat the great epics of the time looked back to Greece and Rome or were really romances in poetry like Orlando Furioso (1516), in one of these epics, GerusalemmeLiberata (1575), Tasso proudly announced the discovery of America by his countryman: "Un uom liguria,"the gentle guide answered the wondering knight Ubaldo, "avr ardimento/ All' incognito corso esporsi in prima." That is to say, she went on, "Tu spiegherai,Colombo, a un novo polo/ Lontano si le fortunate antenne,/ Ch'a pena seguir con gli occhi il volo/ La Fama ch'ha mille occhi e mille penne."49 And Tasso's friend Stigliane apparently thought of writing an epic to honor Columbus.50 Stigliane may have given up, but others did not, at least in England and Spain, for in those countries there were long poems inspired by the New World. None is as good, however, as Comoes' Os Lusiadas (1572) celebrating da Gama and Portugal. Of the many poems about America that have epic qualities, the best is undoubtedly Ercilla'sLa Araucaria,published in three parts (1569, 1578, 1589) and written by a soldier-statesman who was in Peru for the wars he described in his poem.51 Ercilla, impressed not only by the Montesinos-LasCasastradition but by his own experiences, treats the AraucanianIndians sympathetically in their heroic struggleagainst Spanish domination. In ottava rima, the poem provides local color, epic debates and a vision, much bloodshed, and reminiscences of scenes in Homer, Virgil, and Lucan. While Voltaire did not like its emphasis on war, neither did he approve of the Iliad, and he even found a speech by the cacique Colacola in Ercilla's second canto superior to anything in Homer.52 La Araucaria may be the best epic in the Spanish language.53 There is no English epic of the period, if we stop before Milton, unless we count The Faerie Queene, but there were long poems written in England dealing with America which come close. One was by a lad of eighteen at Exeter named WilliamKidley, who in 1624 used not only Richard Hawkins' own Observationsbut information collected from other sources to tell a patriotic tale of Britain'sgreat exploits in the New World.54A generation earlier, another young man, Stephen Parmenius,came to England from Hungary, bringing with him a fine classical education gained on the Continent. In England, he studied navigation at Oxford with Richard Hakluyt the younger, became enthusiastic about the colonizing ventures discussed all around him, wrote a kind of epic published in 1582, the year of Hakluyt's first propagandistic collection, the Divers Voyages, and then, having convinced himself with his poem, sailed with Gilbert to Newfoundland and, like Gilbert, lost his life in the cold North Atlantic. The poem, in Latin hexameters, since Parmeniusknew English most inadequately, has been retranslated (1972) in a splendid volume.55 Parmeniusbegins with fulsome praise of God,
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Queen Elizabeth, and Gilbert, considers the origins of the American Indians, most idealistically hopes to witness their conversion, longs to write the epic of "the rise of the new race," attacks Spain's cruelty and Europe s lust for gold, employs copious classical allusions, shows the influence of Virgil and Camo"M, catalogues the exof to New British the and ends with a prayer World, ploits voyagers to God, Elizabeth, and Britain that they will gently civilize the savages and join them with the English in a great expansionist and progressivemovement. His is one of the most attractive poems about the New World, even though it has had no influence historically. One of the chief influences in belles lettres that came with the discovery of America is the impetus given by that discovery to travel literature and pseudo-travel literature. Of course, the early Renaissance had its Marco Polos and Mandevillesto help, and then there was Pliny, whose unnatural natural history affected the best and worst of travel books until well after 1700; but after 1492 voyage literature not only became more popular with printing and with a New Worldto write about but it became better. The travel letters of two Italians, Columbus and Vespucci,56 for example, are both personal and objective, marvelousand yet realistic, a combination that would make such books more and more fascinating to European readers. Columbus could be objective in reporting his sailingsand landings and troubles and yet insert a story of meeting a large Indian boat off Mexico filled with people dressed in dyed cotton, or Vespucci might tell of women warriorsand a horrible cannibalistic orgy and record personal impressions of South America, where feathers were more valuable than precious metals. A Spaniard such as Alonso Enrquez de Guzman, setting out for America in 1534, might have little on flora and fauna but much about his own experiences.57 A different kind of travel book, the letters of Corts to his king, or Bernai Diaz's account of the conquest of Mexico,58 will often be as personal, but it will also become invaluable in every way to historians of Mexico and, at the same time, be as gripping as any novel. Such books will lead to others, to, for example, Ralegh's Guiana,69which may be the best of real Renaissance travels, comparableto the best of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and a favorite, for example, of Defoe. By the end of the Renaissance, then, Europe had learned to write and read huge quantities of travel literature about the New World. Close to the real travel book, so close in fact that often one cannot separate them, is the imaginaryvoyage, which, inspired in great part by the many actual travel accounts of the New World, grew to maturity in the Renaissance. These imaginaryvoyages could, in fact, pretend to be real, as did La Vida de Marcos de Obregn, by
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Vicente Espinel, who borrowed information and dates from Sarmiento's west-side visit to Magellan'sStrait and then included what all readersagree is "geografia fantastica;"60or an anonymous French ". . . lettre envoye de la Nouvelle-France, par le sieur de Combes" (1609), which takes a fictional person to Canadaby borrowing facts from Champlainand inventing others, carriageson wheels, for example.61 Or they could be completely plagiarizedand intend to deceive, as in the case of Roberval's famous pilot Jean Alphonse and his Cosmographie,taken from a Spanish book of 1519 by Fernandez de Enciro.62Or they could consist of marvelousadventures not all of which were intended to be taken as real, as the later books oi Pantagruel, for example, which draw heavily on accounts of the New World,especially on those written by and told about Jacques Cartier, who lived in and sailed from Rabelais' Saint-Malo.63Such pseudotravel books would increase in number after the Renaissance and lead to many dozens in the eighteenth century. And finally there are the Utopias. What can one say briefly? w That after Plato, Utopias were normally celestial while, after America was discovered, they became earthly during the Renaissance, only to return often to outer space, or inner space, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. That in the Renaissance, from More (1516) to Campanella(1623) and Bacon (1624, published later), Utopias were placed often in the West and employed facts gleaned from writers about America. More's Hythloday accompanied Vespucci, crossed South America with other travelers,and sailed west to Utopia, ire's Indians, no one distinguished between meum where, as with Mart and tuum, land is held in common, gold is despised, there is a plurality of religions, and, as with Vespucci, each home has behind it a beautiful garden open to all. Campanella,as Baudet says, "based much of his ideal state ... on what he thought he knew of the Incas."65 And Bacon, who in the Novum Organumhad thought the travels of the ancients "no more than suburbanexcursions" when compared with the voyages of Columbus and Magellan,in the New Atlantis often cites the New Worldhistorian Acosta as well as the Inca Garcilaso, shows a great interest in theories about ancient Atlantis as America, is one of the first important thinkers to ponder the question of the Jewish or other possible origins of human life in the New World,and of all the statues in his famous house of Salomon names one, that of Columbus, a fact that points not just to Benzoni, Ramusio, and Ovido, all of whom had suggested that statues of Columbus be erected, but also to the long sixteenth-century tradition of using Columbus, as Lope said, as a symbol for "man's unquenchable spirit of discovery."66 It is perhaps this spirit of discovery, of experiment, of innovation, that is one of the marked characteristicsof Renaissance belles
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lettres - from Erasmusand Luther, to Rabelais and the Plaide, to the new drama, to Bruno and Bacon, just as it is of the early historians of America and of the daring sailors, greedy gold seekers, faithful or cruel government officials, and saintly priests who actually went to the New World.And perhapsas important for us to note now is that the influence of the New Worldon Renaissance literature is often no greater than the influence of that literature on the New Worlditself, its conquest and civilization. Not only, for example, did the literary themes of progress, science, Spanish cruelty, the earthly Paradise- all so indebted to Columbus, Magellan,and America give back that influence to explorers and colonists in Virginiaand South America, and not only did the chivalricromances receive encouragement from and yet aid exploration, but More's Utopia, which looked to the WesternWorldand its European visitors, became a sort of second Bible to certain of those Spanish saints who hoped to Christianizethe Indians. Las Casastried to create Utopias, especially in Venezuela, but Vasco de Quiroga, a bishop and jurist, actually built communities in Mexico "pattern[ed] from the good republic proposed by Thomas More," its family and village plan, its elective system, its hospitals.67 It may be true, as Atkinson has shown for France,68that in the sixteenth century western Europe published more books about the Old Worldthan about the New, and certainly there were more love sonnets than embarkation odes, more plays about English Henrys and Richards than about Spanish Pizarros, but the New World, with its changing, challenging image, its cannibals and Noble Savages, its elusive waterways and treasures, its Aztecs and Incas, its villains and saints, its heroes and hopes - all this New World,without hundreds of years of written tradition, still attracted and inspired almost every writer, certainly every literary genre, after Columbus returned with his stirringnews.
PERCY G. ADAMS University of Tennessee
NOTES 1. Hiram Haydn, The Counter-Renaissance (New York: Scribner's, 1950), p. 4. 2. For only a few of the eye-witness accounts of the New World which were widely read and often reprinted in collections in many languages, see Select Documents Illustrating the Four Voyages of Columbus, trans, and ed. Cecil Jane, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt, 1930); The Letters of Amerigo Vespucci trans. Clements R. Markham (London: Hakluyt, 1894); Sir Walter Raleigh, The Discoverie . . . of Guiana, ed. V.T. Harlow^London: Argonaut, 1928; 1st ed. 1596). Add to these the accounts of Balboa, of Corts, of Verrazano; of the French in South America and Florida - Andr Thevet, Jean Ribaut, Jean de Lery, the artist Le Moyne, Jacques Cartier, Champlain, the early Jesuits in Canada; of the early seventeenth-century Dutch navigators - Van Noort, Linschoten, Spilbergen, etc.; as well as many others, the German Hans Staden (1 537), e.g. And then include such collections as Francanzano da Montalboddo, Paesi novamente retrovati (Vicenza, 1507) [a very popular collection reprinted in Italy alone five times by 1521] ; Simon Grynaeus, Novus Orbis (Basle, 1532) [ed. Johann Huttich with introd. by Sebastian Munster;hence the collection is often given Minister's name (in Latin; used by Rabelais, e.g.)] ; Pietro Martire d'Anghiera, De Orbe Novo (Basle, 1533); G.B. Ramusio, Ra ceo Ita di navagazioni
112
et viaegi (Vicenza, 1550-59); La Historia del Mondo Nuovo (Vicenza, 1565); Fernandez de Ovido, Historia general de las Indias (Sevilla, 1535); Girolamo Benzoni, Jose de Acosta, Historia natural y moral de las Indias (Sevilla: Ivan de Leon, 1590) [trans. 1598 into French; 1604 into English; trans, for Hakhiyt Society by Clements R. Markham, 1880, Series 1, Vols. 60-61] ; Gregorio Garcia, Origen de los Indios del Nuevo Mundo (Valencia, 1607); Garcilaso de la Vega (el Inca), Royal Commentaries of Peru, trans. Clements R. Markham (London: Hakluyt, 1 869-71 ), in 2 vols, [also trans. H.V. Livermore (Austin, 1966); first Span. ed. 1609 at Lisbon] ; Francisco Lopez de Gomara, Historia general de las Indias y conquista de Mexico (Saragossa, 1552). The first English collection was of parts of three works, trans. Richard Eden in 1555 and ed. Edward Arber as The First Three English Books on America (Birmingham, 1885); Richard Hakluyt, the last great English editor of voyages in the sixteenth century, made many translations and collected many notes and travel books, his Principall Navigations appearing between 1 589 and 1600. For Germany, see Paul H. Baginsky, "German Works Relating to America 1493-1800," Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 42 (1938), 909-18; 43 (1939) [8 bibliographies] ; 44 (1940), 39-56. These individual voyages and multi-volume collections, which comprise only a part of the list that one could, or should, name, indicate the popularity of Renaissance works about the New World - in spite of G. Atkinson's wellknown conclusion that "entre 1480 et 1609, deux fois plus d'impressions de livres sur les pays de l'Empire turc . . . que sur les deux Amriques" appeared in France. See his Les Nouveaux horizons de la renaissancefranaise (Paris: Droz, 1935), p. 10. 3. See especially Harry Levin, The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance (Bloomington, London: Indiana Univ. Press, 1969) and his bibliography and notes; the first chap, of H.M. Jones, O Strange New World (New York: Viking, 1964; 1st ed. 1952); A.B. Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966) and his excellent bibliographies; and, for only one other, Henri Baudet, Paradise on Earth, trans. Elizabeth Wentholt (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1965). 4. For these and other marvels see Percy G. Adams, Travelersand Travel Liars 1660-1800 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1962), Chap. II especially; Hakluyt, Principall Navigations (London: Dent, 1926), VII, 49; Louis B. Wright,ed., The Elizabethans' America (Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniv. Press, 1965), p. 54, p. 43; Jones, Chaps. I, II; Robert R. Cawley, The Voyagers and Elizabethan Drama (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1938), pp. 273 ff. especially; Cawley, Unpathed Waters(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1940). These books and others depend on visitors to America from Columbus and Vespucci to Pigafetta, perhaps even more on the editors and commentators who magnified their marvels (e.g., see Jones, p. 30 and Adams, pp. 19 ff.) 5. Levin, p. 62. 6.Monardes, Primera y segunda y tercera partes de la historia medicinal . . . de nuestras Indias occidentales . . . (Sevilla, 1574), and Frampton, "trans.," Joyfull Newes out of the Newe Founde World (London, 1577). See Stephen Gaslee's ed. of Frampton, 2 vols. (London, 1925), and H.M. Jones, pp. 401-2, for more information on Monardes, Frampton, and their popularity. 7. Hakluyt, Virginia richly valued, by the description of the main land of Written by a Portugall Gentleman of Elvas . . . Florida, her next neighbor and translated out of Portuguese by Richard Hakluyt" (London: Kyngston, 1609). In Peter Force, ed., Tracts and Other Papers (Washington: Force, 1846), IV, 1-132. 8. See Paul Hulton and D.B. Quinn, The American Drawings of John White, 1577-1590, 2 vols. (London, 1964); Stefan Lorant, ed., The New World: The First Pictures of America made by John White and Jacques Le Moyne and engraved by Theodore De Bry (New York, 1946); and, for a good edition of documents relating to Florida, including the engravings of Le Moyne done in England years after he was in America, Charles E. Bennett, compiler, Settlement of Florida (Gainesville: Univ. of Florida Press, 1968). 9. The accounts of Europeans capturing Americans extend into the hundreds. See, for Frobisher, e.g., Boies Penrose, Traveland Discovery in the Renaissance (Cambridge: HarvardUniv. Press, 1952), p. 176; and for Carder's captives see Arthur A. Tilley, "Rabelais and Geographical Discovery," in Studies in the French Renaissance (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968; first ed. 1922), p. 50. 10. E.g., Levin, Giamatti, Baudet, Jones, etc.
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1 l.Dr. Chanca, in Columbus (see note 2), I, 70. 12. See his The Decades of the New World (Ann Arbor: Univ. Microfilms, 1966), 17a especially, but see also pp. 208, 211, 21 2. 13. For three of many good treatments of this fascinating conflict, see Henry R. Wagner(with the collaboration of Helen Rand Parish) The Life and Writingsof Bartolom de las Casas (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1967), pp. 53, 56, etc.; and Lewis Hanke, Estudios sobre Fray Bartolom de las Casas. . . (Caracas, 1968), as well as his Bartolom de las Casas (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1952). 14. Otis H. Green, Spain and the Western Tradition (Madison and Milwaukee: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1965), p. 90. 15. For more on this myth see Green, Wagner,Wright,Jones, J.H. Elliott, The Old Worldand the New 1492-1650 (Cambridge: The Univ. Press, 1970), and the works of Lewis Hanke, e.g., The First Social Experiments in America: A Study in the Development of Spanish Indian Policy in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: The Univ. Press, 1935). 16. By Micael de Caravajaland Luis Hurtado (Toledo, 1557). See Valentin de Pedro, America en las letras espano las del sigh de oro (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1954), pp. 45-65. 17. See Pedro, 87-92. For much more on Lope and America, see Pedro, pp. 82-1 11, and Marcos a Monnigo, America en el teatro de Lope de Vega (Buenos Aires, 1946). For Tirso de Molina (fray Gabriel Tllez) - best known for his early play on Don Juan - and his trilogy about the Pizarros, see Pedro, e.g., pp. 133-48. 18. See Cawley, Unpathed Waters,p. 134. 19.Cawley, The Voyagers and Elizabethan Drama, pp. 384-87. 20. In "To Sir Henry Wotten." 21. John Phillips, The Tears of the Indians (London, 1656). The Idea of Progress (New York: Dover Pubs., 1955; first ed. 1932). 22.J.B. Bury, 23. Baron, " The Querelle of the Ancients and the Moderns as a Problem for Renaissance Scholarship," Journal of the History of Ideas, 20 (1959), 3-22. See also Haydn, p. 521 ; Atkinson, p. 253; Daniel Mnager, Introduction la vie littraire du XVIe sicle (Paris: Bordas, 1968); J.H. Elliott, pp. 11-1 2; Clarence J. Blacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1967); and Eugenio Garin, L'Educazione in Europe, 1400-1600 (Bari, 1957). 24.Martire, p. 215. 25. Quoted by Green, p. 78. 26. Ibid., p. 42. 27. Ibid., p. 30. 28. From Vives' De Disc ipUnis, which was re-edited in England in 1612. Quoted by Baron, p. 14. 29. Ibid. 30. Bodin, Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionenu Quoted in Baron, pp. 10-11. 31. See Cawley, Voyagers*p. 327. 32. Ibid., p. 347. 33.Howard B. White, Peace Among the Willows (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), p. 130;J.G. Crowther, Francis Bacon (London: Cresset, 1969), pp. 112-13, 106-7. 34. Green, pp. 37-38. 35. See Elizabeth Armstrong, Ronsard and the Age of Gold (Cambridge: The Univ. Press, 1968). 36. These are the words of H.S.V. Jones, A Spenser Handbook (New York: Crofts, 1930), p. 309, who supports them with good evidence. 37. On Las Casas vision, e.g., see Hanke, Las Casas, p. 33; Irving A. Leonard, Books of the Brave (New York: Gordian Press, 1964), p. 7; and Wagner,p. 7. 38. J.H. Elliott, p. 73. 39. Wright, p. 15. 40. Ibid., p. 14. 41. See, e.g., Armstrong on Ronsard; for John Donne's allusions to America, see Cawley, Voyagers and Unpathed Waters;Winfred Schleiner, The Imagery of John Donne*s Sermons (Providence: Brown Univ. Press, 1970), especially p. 91 ; and Milton Rugoff, Donne's Imagery (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), especially pp. 137 ff. 42. For much on promotion literature, see H.M. Jones, O Brave New World, but, better still, his seminal essay "The Colonial Impulse," Proc. Amer. Phil Soc, Vol. 90, no. 2(1946), pp. 131-61.
1 14
43. See, e.g., Edwin H. Zeydel, "Sebastian Brant and the Discovery of America,'* JEGP, 42 (1943), 10-11. 44.Erasums* Colloquies were the most popular item in Cambridge book stores in the early sixteenth century. See also his "A Marriagein Name Only," which is concerned with one of his favorite subjects, the pox, or syphilis, supposedly brought back to Europe by Columbus; or Vives* "El Convite**and "Los Habladores" (Pedro, pp. 39-40, for more). 45.The Colloquies of Erasmus, trans. C.R. Thompson (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1965), pp. 203-1 7, 401-1 2. 46. For Leonard, see note 37; look especially at pp. 16-64. One should add to Leonard the well-known stories of fighting women told by Vespucci (see note 2) on his first voyage. 47. Leonard, p. 39. 48. For example, see the map of North America in Chtelain*sAtlas Historique (Amsteroff the relatively unknown western dam, 1719), showing a huge island, called "California,** coast. 49.Tasso, La Gerusalemme Liberata, XV, xxxi-xxxii. ["A knight of Genes shall have the hardiment/ Upon this wondrous voyage first to wend/ . . . Thy ship, Columbus, shall her canvas wing/ Spread o*er that world that yet concealed lies.**Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, trans. Edward Fairfax (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1962, pp. 38081] . Jones, p. 400, points out that not until 1581 would Columbus become the subject of a "major** poem, De navagatione c. Columbi libri quattuor, by Lorenzo Gambara of Brescia. 50. Gilbert Chinard, L'Exotisme amricain dans la littrature franaise au XVIe sicle (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1911), p. 223. 51. The standard edition of the Araucaria\s in five vols., d. Jos Toribio Medina (Santiago de Chile, 1910-18). See also Alonso de Ercilla, La Araucaria (selecci6n), introduction y notas de Juan Loveluck, segunda edidon (Santiago de Chile: Empresa Editora Zig-Zig, 1962), with its bibliography, as well as Julio Caillet-Bois, Antisis de La Araucaria (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de America Latina S.A., 1967). A recently re-discovered and published English translation of about 1600 is The Histori of Araucana, introd. and notes by Frank Pierce (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1964). For more on the Renaissance Spanish-American epic and long poem, see F. Rand Morton, Notes on the History of a Literary Genre; the Renaissance Epic in Spain and America (Mexico, 1962), and Pedro (note 16). 52. See Voltaire's Essai sur la posie pique. 53. Leonard, p. 110, is not the only one to think it so. 54.Cawley, Unpathed Waters,pp. 147-48. 55. The New Found Land of Stephen Parmenius. The life and writings of a Hungarian poet, drowned on a voyage from Newfoundland, 1583. Ed. and trans, with commentaries by David B. Quinn and Neil M. Cheshire (Toronto and Buffalo: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1972). 56. See note 2. 57. See J.H. Elliott, p. 20, on Guzman. 58.Hernando Corts, The Letters ofHernando Corts, d. J. Bayard Morris (London: Broadway Travellers, 1928); and Bernai Diaz del Castillo, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, ed. and trans. A.P. Mandslay, five vols. (London: Hakluyt, 1908-16). Add to these fascinating volumes others listed in, e.g., Penrose, pp. 335. 59. For Ralegh, see note 2. 60. Pedro, pp. 112-13. 61. For "le sieur de Combes,*' see Atkinson, pp. 311-12. 62.SeeTilley, pp. 46-49. 63. Ibid., 51-52 especially. Much could be added to this brief discussion of imaginary or pseudo-voyage literature, e.g., Thomas Lodge's A Margarite of America (London, 1596) with its game - to become standard - of Lodge's receiving his MS. from a priest in Santos, Brazil; or Anthonie Knivet, with Cavendish in South America, returning to write a fanciful account (see Adams, pp. 24-30). 64. The bibliography for Utopias is massive. See, e.g., for Utopias in general and for famous Renaissance Utopias in particular, H.W. Donner, Introduction to Utopia (London: Sidgwick and Jackson; Uppsala; Almqvist and Wiksells, 1945); G.E. Dermenghem, Thomas More et les utopistes de la renaissance (Paris, 1927); R.W. Chambers, Thomas More (London: Cape, 1927); Frederick R. White, d., Famous Utopias of the Renaissance (New York: Hendricks House, 1955); Edward L. Surtz, S.J., The Praise of Wisdom, A Com-
115
mentary on the Religious and Moral Backgrounds of Saint Thomas More's "Utopia" (Chicago: Loyola Univ. Press, 1957); Howard B. White, Peace Among the Willows. The Political Philosophy of Francis Bacon (see note 33); J.G. Crowther (note 33); J.H. Hexter, More's Utopia. The Biography of an Idea (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1952); L. Sprague de Camp, Lost Continents (New York: Gnome Press, 1954); Lewis Mumford, The Story of Utopias (New York: Viking, 1962: first ed. 1922): Robert C. Elliott, The Shape of Utopia. Studies in a Literary Genre (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970). 65. Baudet, p. 28. 66. J.H. Elliott, pp. 11-12. 67. For Las Casas, see note 13; for Quiroga, see Silvio Zavala, La 'Utopia de Toms More en la Nueva Espdna y otros estudios (Mexico City, 1937); Zavala, "The American Utopia of the Sixteenth Century," Huntington Library Quarterly, 10, no. 4 (Aug. 1947), 337-47; Zavala, Sir Thomas More in New Spain (London, 1955); F.B. Warren, Vasco de Quiroga and His Pueblo Hospitals of Santa F (Washington, 1963). 68. See note 2 for Atkinson s conclusions.

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The Discovery of America and European Renaissance Literature Author(s): Percy G. Adams Source: Comparative Literature Studies, Vol.

The Discoveryof America and European RenaissanceLiterature

LITERATURE AND DISCOVERY

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

LITERATURE AND DISCOVERY

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

LITERATURE AND DISCOVERY

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

LITERATURE AND DISCOVERY

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

LITERATURE AND DISCOVERY

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

LITERATURE AND DISCOVERY

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

LITERATURE AND DISCOVERY

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

LITERATURE AND DISCOVERY

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