“Our World Has Just Discovered Another Worldˮ: How the Discovery of the New World Influenced the Historical Consciousness of the Sixteenth-Century French Humanists

Abstract

The author examines the influence of the discovery of the New World on the historical consciousness of the French humanists of the sixteenth century. A study of the Latin treatises of Jean Fernel (1548), Jean Bodin (1566), the French works of Louis Le Roy (1567, 1575) and Michel de Montaigne (1580, 1588), allows one to challenge the idea established in historiography, according to which the discovery of the New World, the appreciation of new achievements, such as the compass, artillery, and printing, led humanists not only to recognise the superiority of their time over the antiquity, but also to the “idea of progress”. Indeed, French humanists, referring to modern geographical discoveries and unprecedented inventions, proclaimed the superiority of their era over antiquity in knowledge of the world, declared that their contemporaries had transcended antique experience, learned the whole of the globe and transformed the world into a single space of exchange and trade for the first time. Critical position of De Montaigne, who disputed the exhaustive nature of modern geographical discoveries and the innovative nature of a number of inventions, did not spread, because it did not meet the needs of humanists in high historical self-esteem. It was this need that often led intellectuals of the epoch to compare “our age” and antiquity and to be convinced of the superiority of modernity. However, the idea of the superiority of the modern era never developed into the “idea of progress” in the culture of French humanism. For humanists, this complex conception, according to which humanity moved successively towards a desirable image of the future, was both superfluous (in terms of satisfying the need for a high historical self-esteem) and inconsistent with their world view. The conditions for the birth of the idea of progress emerged only in the eighteenth century, within the culture of the Enlightenment. The humanists' understanding of history was based on the idea of cycles, the idea that human civilization, once established, would periodically reach its peak and then inevitably decline. This was borne out by all the historical experience available to humanists.