Making sense of the exotic: the differing impact of travel reports in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought

Abstract

ABSTRACT In his 1681 Discours sur l’histoire universelle, Bossuet declared that Christianity provided the organizing thread of history, and anything that was not guided by it was irrelevant. Nine years later, in Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, travel reports provided the primary source of information, above all in their demonstration of the extent of moral diversity. During the Enlightenment, reports of thoroughly “alien” worlds, notably the New World and China, began to be treated as offering wholly unprecedented perspectives on the world and our place in it. The paper surveys how interpretation of the reports changed radically between their original appearance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and when subjected to new templates of understanding in the Enlightenment.