Reviewed by: To Feast on Us as Their Prey: Cannibalism and the Early Modern Atlantic ed. by Rachel B. Herrmann Heather R. Peterson (bio) To Feast on Us as Their Prey: Cannibalism and the Early Modern Atlantic. Edited by Rachel B. Herrmann. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2019. Pp. v, 282. $54.21 cloth; $20.96 paper) Rachel Herrmann’s new edited volume To Feast on Us as Their Prey: Cannibalism and the Early Modern Atlantic illustrates the centrality of cannibalism to ideas about savagery and colonialism, complicating ideas regarding the reality and impetus of cannibalism among native groups like the Tupinamba as well as Europeans in the New World. As a pedagogical tool, Herrmann’s introduction provides a textbook example of a thorough historiography of cannibalism studies, breaking down the major questions, arguments, and complications. She then fits each of the contributions into their respective historiographical debate highlighting new strands and connections. Herrmann notes that there are three main questions being asked: did cannibalism actually exist? What does the representation of cannibalism tell us? And microhistories elucidating questions of identity and meaning (p. 4). Her chapter “The Black People were not Good to Eat” examines cannibalism during the middle passage, Olaudah Equiano’s reversal of the cannibal narrative, and the way that hunger was used both as a tool to control slaves and seamen, while refusing food was a way to re-appropriate power within a very unequal dynamic (pp. 195–213). [End Page 491] The two strongest essays look at cannibalism and the European psyche. In “Spaniards, Cannibals, and the Eucharist in the New World,” Rebecca Earle examines the tension between Spanish justifications for conquest, based largely on the Indian’s “excesses,” including cannibalism, drunkenness, and sodomy, and their own cannibalistic experiences in the New World as recorded by Peter Martyr and López de Gómora. Finally, she notes that the transubstantiation taking place in the Eucharist made it difficult for Spanish writers to distinguish eating the body of Christ from the anthropophagy of the Indians, and while they warned Indians not to eat people, they were eager for them to “hunger avidly for the body of Christ” (p. 94). Matt Williamson’s piece “Imperial Appetites: Cannibalism and Early Modern Theatre” examines the 1622 play The Sea Voyage in relation to the burgeoning capitalism of the English Atlantic. He argues that cannibalism in theatre was frequently used to parody the excessive consumption and greed of the age, noting that these plays did not present cannibalism as “the property of an ostensibly un-civilized Other but rather and index of what those who were ostensibly civilized could become or even of what they might already be” (p. 125). In the play, a group of pirates are stranded on a barren island, remarkable because it contradicted the projected image of the bounty of the New World and because it mirrored contemporaneous moments of hunger like the Starving Time in Jamestown. Williamson parses the text of the play comparing the “sharing” out of the victim, a young woman, with “shares” in the Virginia Company and the King’s Men, who performed the play. Here cannibalism “provided a way to explore the playwrights’—and their audience’s—anxious complicity with the capitalist appetites The Sea Voyage ostensibly condemned” (p. 134). The rest of the essays move more or less chronologically and geographically. Elena Daniele provides an interesting chapter looking at the way merchants in Italy acquired news of the New World and her people. Kelly Watson looks at “Sex and Cannibalism,” and Jessica [End Page 492] Hower has a complicated chapter tracing a microhistory of the Tudors alongside English expansionist propaganda. The weakest contribution is Gregory Smithers’s “Rituals of Consumption,” which examines cannibalism in both “rumors” and myths of “Native Southerners” (a questionable concept) arguing that Europeans, who had an “urgent need to establish order” created the Indians as bloodthirsty savages (p. 27). Overall, the volume provides a fascinating glimpse into the forces that created the Atlantic World and European tropes regarding greed, consumption, and cannibalism. Heather R. Peterson HEATHER R. PETERSON teaches history at the University of South Carolina Aiken. Her book manuscript “Consuming the Miserable Indians” examines the...
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Mar 1, 2024
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