Samuel Purchas Research Articles

Converging on Cannibals: Terrors of Slaving in Atlantic Africa, 1509–1670

Converging on Cannibals: Terrors of Slaving in Atlantic Africa, 1509–1670

Translating Empire, Translating Cartier and Léry into English: text and context in comparative narratives of expansion and the new world

This article provides comparative texts and contexts between Brazil and Canada in the Atlantic world, not simply an Inter-American comparison, but a trans-Atlantic and global typology. It focuses on the translation of empire through translation, particularly of part of Jacques Cartier’s narratives about Canada by John Florio in 1580 and of Jean de Léry’s account of the voyage to Brazil in Samuel Purchas’ collection in 1625. English travel or encounter literature is in the service of contact, exploration, encounter and possible possession and settlement. The Spanish, through Columbus, and the Portuguese as well as the French are part of this comparative literature and these cultural texts, which are intertextual and translational, among themselves and with English culture and literature. The encounter between the Indigenous peoples and Europeans in the New World, in Brazil and Canada is central to changing the literature and cultures of the Americas, Europe, Africa, and of the world as seen in the texts analyzed here. The building of English travel accounts, literature and empire is also, to an important degree, intertextual, intercultural, and translational.

Relation of Virginia: A Boy's Memoir of Life with the Powhatans and the Patawomecks transed. by Henry Spelman

Reviewed by: Relation of Virginia: A Boy's Memoir of Life with the Powhatans and the Patawomecks transed. by Henry Spelman Frederic W. Gleach (bio) Relation of Virginia: A Boy's Memoir of Life with the Powhatans and the Patawomecks henry spelman; transcribed, edited, and with an introduction by karen ordahl kupperman New York University Press, 2019 96 pp. Henry Spelman was one of two young Englishmen who went from England to Virginia in the early years of the Jamestown colony and ended up spending much of their time living in the local Native communities, effectively traded to the Powhatan Indians by the leaders of the colony. The likely intention, and consequence, of that arrangement was that they learned the local language and customs, and they served as translators and intermediaries between the colonizers and the Indigenous people. This volume presents a pair of transcriptions of a narrative written (or more likely dictated) by Spelman, probably when he was back in England in 1611–12, about three years after the events in question; there was a published transcription in the late nineteenth century, when the manuscript first resurfaced, but it is not widely accessible. This edition, newly transcribed by Karen Ordahl Kupperman, will be a valuable tool for scholars and students considering the early colonial period in Virginia. At age fourteen, Spelman was on the cusp of adulthood; having received some education and upbringing in English ways, but still young enough to be flexible in acquiring cultural norms. Beyond the pragmatic desires for intermediaries between the two cultures, there was considerable curiosity in England about the Native people in the colonial territories, and English intellectuals like Samuel Purchas interviewed and published the accounts of many who returned from travels about their experiences—including Henry Spelman (similar curiosity about the English was likely among the Powhatans, but that aspect is recorded only in passing references in the [End Page 621] English documents). The published Purchas interview is also included here, along with a passage about religious beliefs conveyed by Spelman to William Strachey, included in his Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania (Strachey himself had returned from Virginia in 1612). Spelman's narrative provides many details of the daily lives, practices, and beliefs of the Powhatan and Potomac Indians, and the manuscript as transcribed and presented here gives some of our closest observations from the early period of English colonization in Virginia—including his clarifications and efforts to be as accurate as possible reflected in revisions to the manuscript, which are captured in the second, verbatim, transcription (the first transcription is "cleaned up" with modern spelling and punctuation, to be more readable). Nineteen pages of the manuscript are also reproduced in facsimile so that readers can see the original writing and editing. This provides a great opportunity for learning about the kinds of decisions made in transcription, and it is a good brief sampling of a (fairly legible) early seventeenth-century hand—a very useful aspect, as relatively few are able to study the original manuscripts of this period in person. The text also provides a good example of the sometimes infuriating difficulties of working with such primary documents. The details provided by Spelman have been very useful to scholars studying the period, but they must be taken with caveats. Even when giving Indigenous beliefs and practices, Spelman was seeing and hearing these and processing them through the mind of an Englishman. Such categories as "king," "god," and "priest" had meanings in the English worldview that almost certainly differed from the meanings of the positions and ideas being labeled with those terms. And there were almost certainly differences in the understandings and beliefs and practices between the "core" Powhatan groups and the Potomacs among whom Spelman spent much of his time (and even among the Powhatan groups themselves), but these are undifferentiated in the narrative; all of these ideas are presented as if they were universally held among the Native people of Virginia (if not even more broadly). Even these "primary" texts have to be seen as coming through a series of "lenses" that shaped the content and the way it was presented. Kupperman is among the most accomplished and capable...

En skipbruddberetnings sirkulasjon gjennom tre tidligmoderne kunnskapsprosjekter

This article investigates three different national contexts of knowledge production that use the shipwreck story of Piero Querini of 1431. The first is Venetian: Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s Navigationi et viaggi (1559) stands at the cross roads between old and new knowledge, and the skipwreck story is emblematic of Venetian travellers being the first to explore various parts of the globe, as well as being an Odyssean example of heroic courage. The second is English: Samuel Purchas’ theological geography and apocalyptic mercantilism in Hakluyt Postumous, or Purchas his Pilgrime (1625) seeks to present the reader with moral building blocks for Bacons new knowledge project, in which the shipwreck underlines God’s mercy and providence in a work otherwise filled with relations of English efforts to find a passage to the East by way of the North. The last context is Norwegian: In Gerhard Schøning’s exemplary historiography the shipwreck has become a relation of remnants of the heroic Northerners he sought to present in his other works.

Milton and the "Savage Deserts of America"

Milton and the "Savage Deserts of America" Elizabeth Sauer "Whether a reader wishes to see a New World connection or not, the language of Paradise Lost creates it." —Rodger Martin, "The Colonization of Paradise" Tzvetan Todorov applied the descriptors "astonishing," "intense," "extreme," and "exemplary" to characterize early modern Europeans' first reported encounters with the alterity of the Americas and the indigenous peoples. Over the centuries Europeans demonstrated an awareness of Africa, India, and China; "some memory of these places was always there already—from the beginning," Todorov confirms.1 As for the Americas, given the belated public record of a European contact, this alien, captivating place still required comprehension and possession. Literary works enabled and instantiated some of these efforts—intellectual and territorial. "Of late / Columbus found the American," Milton declares in recounting the immediate aftermath of human disobedience in Paradise Lost.2 Two books later, in a long, globe-consuming epic catalog (PL 11.383–411), Milton's prophetic narrator, Michael, directs Adam's gaze slowly westward, while [End Page 3] mapping and naming capitals and historic rulers of Asia, Africa, and Europe, which, until the late fifteenth century, were the known continents. By Milton's day, the Americas were, as the geographer and antiquarian Peter Heylyn states in his massive chorographical project Cosmographie, "lately known."3 In Milton's encyclopedic epic, the Americas still lie beyond Adam's view, beyond the horizon and the ecliptic, the path of the earth with respect to the sun. Essentially, Adam needs to be hoisted on the shoulders of Atlas, Hercules, and Milton's Michael to experience "in spirit perhaps" (PL 11.406) the Americas, which extend, if not geographically then conceptually, into the unknown Southern Hemisphere. Still in Milton's day, the Americas were an otherworldly place, occupying a liminal space between the known and unknown, and thus inviting reclamation and representation. The earliest encounters with the Americas may have predated Columbus by many centuries. In the first century BCE, Greek geographer Diodorus of Sicily (Siculus) wrote of the islands beyond "the Pillars of Hercules" or the Straits of Gibraltar, "There lies out in the deep off Libya an island of considerable size. … Its land is fruitful, much of it being mountainous and not a little being a level plain of surpassing beauty. … the island contains many parks planted with trees of every variety and gardens in great multitudes." Diodorus goes on to suggest a possible encounter of a western land by the Phoenicians and Carthaginians from Northern Africa.4 The land mass in question was known as "India Occident" (India Occidentalis), "occident" meaning "going down" or, in some cases, "setting" like the sun. In the early modern era, the first terrestrial globe, produced by the German cartographer and navigator Martin Behaim in 1492, may contain some traces of the latterly identified South America, but it features no clear indications of the continent's existence. Columbus's 1492 voyage would result in the early modern "discovery" of the Caribbean islands, and in 1498 he would land on the South American mainland. Given the relative novelty of the Americas, the indirectness of transatlantic routes, and the vastness of his own imagination, Milton's virtual travels to the Americas are marked by detours, [End Page 4] circumnavigations, and chance encounters. To devote an essay to an investigation of how the New World—as a whole and as a precursor to the latterly defined North, Central, and South America—registers in Milton's works can be a daunting and frustrating exercise. Scholars venturing into the territory of Milton in the Americas readily discover that there is no conspicuous New World orientation in Milton, J. Martin Evans's influential argument in Milton's Imperial Epic notwithstanding.5 Literary evidence confirms Milton's familiarity with Walter Ralegh's Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Beautiful Empyre of Guiana (1596), Samuel Purchas's Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes (1625), and Peter Heylyn's Cosmographie (1652); yet "America occupied no significant place in Milton's mental geography," William Spengeman concedes in "Milton's American Poem."6 In the few allusions to the New World in Milton's prose and verse, the Americas appear as degenerate or inferior...

Literary Representations of The Great Barrier Reef

In 1626 Samuel Purchas published an anthology of travel stories which included an account by François Pyrard de Laval of his shipwreck on a coral reef in the Maldives for 5 years in the first decade of the seventeenth century. Purchas translates Laval's account of the coral atolls as follows:<br />All the shallowes are stone, Rocke and sand, so that when the tide is out, it reacheth not to ones waste, and for the most part to the mid-legge; so that is were very easie to goe wihtout a Boate throughout all the Isles of the same Atollon, if it were not for two causes. The one great fishes called Paimones, which devoure men and breake their legges and armes, when they encounter them; the other is that the depths of the Sea are generally very keene and sharpe Rockes which hurt them wonderfully that goe into it. And moreover they meete with many branches of a certaine thing which I know not whether to terme Tree or Rocke, it is not much unlike white Corall, which is also branched and piercing, but altogether polished; on the contrary, this is rugged, all hollow and pierced with little holes and passages, yet abides hard and ponderous as a stone. (Purchas, vol IX, 509).

The Strange and Dangerous Voyage of Captaine Thomas James: A Critical Edition ed. by Colleen M. Franklin (review)

Colleen M. Franklin, ed. The Strange and Dangerous Voyage of Captaine Thomas James: A Critical Edition. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's up, 2014. 243 pp. $100. When early modern travel literature was experiencing a kind of critical renaissance in the mid 2000s, Julia Schleck pointed out how many narratives discussing the implications of early modern travel relied too heavily on certain canonical sources. Schleck argued in part that the reliance of contemporary critics to draw primarily from Hakluyt's collection of travel narratives potentially reinscribes a narrative colonialism. From here, she suggests that the recontextualization of these narratives that modernizes them destroys the early modern readers. While Coleen M. Franklin's critical edition of Strange and Dangerous Voyage of Captaine Thomas James is slightly past the historical context of Hakluyt's work (his last work Principall Navigations was published in 1600; James's text is published in 1633), her work sidesteps the problem of narrative colonialism by contextualizing the historical reception of the text and providing access and critical context for an important early modern narrative. Franklin's stated goals are to present a text as faithfully as she could (and to that end she changes little of the source text) and to make the text available and accessible to academic and interested amateur alike. In pointing out the substantial influence James's work had on many artists, and the notes and introduction she provides, Franklin presents a text that achieves both of her stated goals and avoids destroying the context with modernization. In spite of the surge in academic interest in early modern travel literature, few printed critical editions like Franklin's have emerged. Scholars have often relied on texts collected by Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas. These collections can be difficult to navigate, especially Purchas, but in the early twentieth century J. M. Dent and H. G. Rawlinson produced impressive yet problematical reprintings of Hakluyt's and Purchas's collections. The Hakluyt Society has also been active in publishing travel narratives, but few of these offer as sustained a critical study as Franklin's critical edition. The scarcity of print critical editions can in part be explained by the rise of Internet technology and websites like Early English Books Online. Franklin describes the significant difficulties of finding a good, readable copy of Strange and Dangerous Voyage, and her stated goal to produce a text in a state much like what readers in the seventeenth century would have experienced would certainly be destroyed by hypertext. Another significant value of Franklin's text, aside from those who wish to dispense with the fetish of digital for the haptic pleasure of a printed book, is its introduction (the text of the introduction is 126 pages long with 274 endnotes). Here Franklin traces the reception history of James's text, delineating public interest in Strange and Dangerous Voyage to its present reception, and posits the direction of future scholarship. The text is broken into four primary parts: a critical introduction, James's text (including appendices from James on longitude, a note to divinity scholars at Cambridge, and a list of nautical instruments he used), and substantial notes on James's text. Franklin also includes appendices of nautical terms, names of persons and places referred to in James's text, and a bibliography of critical works on James. Strange and Dangerous Voyage is a part of a very large corpus of texts describing the search for a northwest passage. While he, of course, failed in his attempt, the narrative of his voyage was popular during his lifetime, as was interest in the discovery of a northwest passage, and remained popular for many years after his death. Franklin's introduction begins with medieval perspectives of the north and how they potentially influenced James's writing. …

John Dee's 'Brytish Impire': 'A Laborious Treatise' on Ophir of 1577

Previous articleNext article No AccessJohn Dee's 'Brytish Impire': 'A Laborious Treatise' on Ophir of 1577Graham YewbreyGraham Yewbrey Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes Volume 78, Number 12015 Published for the Warburg Institute and the Courtauld Institute Views: 6Total views on this site Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/JWCI26321956 Views: 6Total views on this site Copyright © 2015 by The Warburg Institute. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Invention of Viking America

The Invention of Viking AmericaThis essay is an extended review of Annette Kolodny's In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). The 448-page paperback includes ten illustrations and is priced at $27.95.IN SEARCH OF FIRST CONTACT: THE VIKINGS OF VINLAND, THE PEOPLES OF THE DAWNLAND, AND THE ANGLO-AMERICAN ANXIETY OF DISCOVERY. By Annette Kolodny. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2012. xiv + 448 pp. $27.95, paperback.Since the publication of her seminal books and articles in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, Annette Kolodny has been a true pioneer in literary historiography. Indeed, if the field of Literature as understood today has come to include multiple approaches and perspectives- including multicultural, multilingual, trans- and circum-Atlantic, as well as hemispheric perspectives-thereby utterly transforming what we mean by both American and Literature, it is in great part owing to Kolodny's tireless efforts in opening up new archives beyond the New Critical canons to include texts written in English as well as other languages by white men as well as nonwhite men and women, many of whom originated from outside the traditional Anglo-American elites. Her most recent book, In Search of First Contact, continues her quest to transform literary and to open up new archives by considering the literary record of the contact between the Americas and Europe in the eleventh century resulting from the voyages of Leif Eiriksson and other Norsemen, in particular the so-called Vinland Sagas first preserved among the Norse as oral traditions and then written down in the fourteenth century, as well as various Native artifacts and oral traditions possibly bearing testimony to this first contact. In addition, the book considers the cultural of the idea of a contact resulting from the Norse in Anglo-American letters from colonial times to the twentieth century. On the one hand, then, Kolodny writes, [T]his book is overwhelmingly about stories: about who told them, when, and where (10). On the other hand, however, it also means to take full advantage of much recent scholarship in archaeology, anthropology, ethnology, and history (10) in order to raise new historical questions about the nature and location of the Vinland colony, as well as about the Native Vinlanders (called Skraelings in the Sagas). The result is a book that impresses in the innovativeness of its thoroughly inter- or multi-disciplinary methodology, drawing as it does on a number of literary and nonliterary archives.As the author is doubtlessly aware, the of the notion of a contact or discovery predating Christopher Columbus's voyages reaches back in Europe to Columbus's own time, when such Spanish imperial historians as Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes, writing on behalf of the Spanish crown in the context of its legal fight against the Columbus family, spread tales about some anonymous pilot who had supposedly imparted the secret knowledge of the existence of a fourth to Columbus before the latter embarked on his first transatlantic voyage. The implications of this tale, if true, were clear: the rights and privileges that the crown had previously bestowed on Columbus and his descendants in the Capitulations of Santa Fe in April of 1492 regarding any lands and islands he might on his Westerly way to Asia were null and void, since he would not have been the first to discover those lands. During the seventeenth century, English imperialists such as Samuel Purchas added their own versions to the old story of a prediscovery by arguing that the so-called Rights of Discovery of the North continent belonged to England because of John Cabot's voyages on behalf of the English crown, rather than to Spain or Portugal (given that Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci had only touched the Caribbean islands and South America), and that, in any case, America had already been discovered by some medieval Welsh prince named Madoc in 1170. …

A million and one gods: the persistence of polytheism

Many people worship not just one but many gods. Yet a relentless prejudice against denies legitimacy to some of the world's oldest and richest religious traditions. In her examination of polytheistic cultures both ancient and contemporary--those of Greece and Rome, the Bible and the Quran, as well as modern India--Page duBois refutes the idea that the worship of multiple gods naturally evolves over time into the higher belief in a single deity. In A Million and One Gods, she shows that has endured intact for millennia even in the West, despite the many hidden ways that monotheistic thought continues to shape Western outlooks.In English usage, the word polytheism comes from the seventeenth-century writings of Samuel Purchas. It was pejorative from the beginning--a word to distinguish the belief system of backward peoples from the more theologically advanced religion of Protestant Christians. Today, when monotheistic fundamentalisms too often drive people to commit violent acts, remains a scandalous presence in societies still oriented according to Jewish, Christian, and Muslim beliefs. Even in the multicultural milieus of twenty-first-century America and Great Britain, finds itself marginalized. Yet it persists, perhaps because corresponds to unconscious needs and deeply held values of tolerance, diversity, and equality that are central to civilized societies.

Faith, form and faction: Samuel Purchas's Purchas His Pilgrimage (1613)

In his Purchas his Pilgrimage (1613) Samuel Purchas claimed to ‘bring Religion from Paradise to the Arke, and thence follow her about the World, and (for her sake) obserue the World it selfe, with the seuerall Countries and peoples therein’. This project was clearly ambitious and encyclopaedic, incorporating all the religions of the known world with the exclusion of Europe, but it was also necessarily innovative. This article explores the way in which Purchas leads his reader from one faith into copious different faiths in a journey underpinned by the expectation of apocalyptic resolution and reunification. Of particular prominence are his struggles with the relative value of non‐Christian religions and their vexed incorporation into a narrative of Anglican universalism.

The First English History of the Russian Time of Troubles: Samuel Purchas’s “Late Changes” (1625)

Samuel Purchas’s Hakluytus Posthumus, first published in 1625, is a collection of travel accounts similar to that edited by Richard Hakluyt in the late sixteenth century, but it also includes the earliest secondary history of the Time of Troubles in English. Purchas’s chapter entitled “The late changes and manifold alterations in Russia since Ivan Vasilowich to this present …” combines documentary publication with narrative history. This article examines the source materials used by Purchas and discusses his own commentary on events. Purchas considers that historians should demonstrate the justice of God’s providence in punishing a people’s sins, and he assesses the reigns of Ivan IV and Boris Godunov in this light. He enlivens his narrative with elaborate metaphors, including that of Russia during the interregnum of 1610–1612 as a “many-headed monster”. This metaphor was commonly used by conservative writers in early modern England to designate the ordinary people, but Purchas uses it more creatively in relation to Russia, to signify not only the multitude but also the rival candidates for the throne, including pretenders (samozvantsy).

Western Visions of the Far East in a Transpacific Age, 1522–1657

Contents: Introduction: Europe's encounter of Asia in early modernity Part 1 Imagining the Far East from Europe: 'The Indies of the West' or, the tale of how an imaginary geography circumnavigated the globe, Ricardo PadrA^3n Imagining China in a golden age Spanish epic, Christina H. Lee. Part 2 Discovering the Far East: The first China hands: the forgotten Iberian origins of Sinology, Liam Matthew Brockey Matteo Ricci on China via Samuel Purchas: faithful re-presentation, Nicholas Koss Representations of China and Europe in the writings of Diego de Pantoja: accommodating the East or privileging the West? Robert Richmond Ellis Women in the eyes of a Jesuit between the East Indies, New Spain, and early modern Europe, Haruko Natawa Ward. Part 3 Sightings of the Far East in Europe: Chinos in 16th-century Spain, Juan Gil Native vassals: Chinos, indigenous identity, and legal protection in early modern Spain, Tatiana Seijas Travelers from afar through civic spaces: the Tensho embassy in Renaissance Italy, Marco Musillo The Borghese papacy's reception of a samurai delegation and its fresco-image at Palazzo del Quirinale, Rome, Mayu Fujikawa Bibliography Index.

Francis Bacon's Natural History and the Senecan Natural Histories of Early Modern Europe

At various stages in his career, Francis Bacon claimed to have reformed and changed traditional natural history in such a way that his new "natural and experimental history" was unlike any of its ancient or humanist predecessors. Surprisingly, such claims have gone largely unquestioned in Baconian scholarship. Contextual readings of Bacon's natural history have compared it, so far, only with Plinian or humanist natural history. This paper investigates a different form of natural history, very popular among Bacon's contemporaries, but yet unexplored by contemporary students of Bacon's works. I have provisionally called this form of natural history'Senecan' natural history, partly because it took shape in the Neo-Stoic revival of the sixteenth-century, partly because it originates in a particular cosmographical reading of Seneca's Naturales quaestiones. I discuss in this paper two examples of Senecan natural history: the encyclopedic and cosmographical projects of Pierre de la Primaudaye (1546-1619) and Samuel Purchas (1577-1626). I highlight a number of similarities between these two projects and Francis Bacon's natural history, and argue that Senecan natural history forms an important aspect in the historical and philosophical background that needs to be taken into consideration if we want to understand the extent to which Bacon's project to reform natural history can be said to be new.

From Pilgrimage to History: The Renaissance and Global Historicism. John G. Demaray . New York: AMS Press, 2006. Pp. xv+250.

<i>From Pilgrimage to History: The Renaissance and Global Historicism</i>. John G. Demaray . New York: AMS Press, 2006. Pp. xv+250.

Simon de Passe's cartographic portrait of Captain John Smith and a new England (1616/7)

The complex image John Smith New England 1 — designed and engraved by Simon de Passe (c.1595–1647) 2 and printed in London by one George Low in 1616/7 — has attracted the attention of many histori...

From Pilgrimage to History: The Renaissance and Global Historicism

I. Walter Ralegh's Historicist Inheritance: God's Providential World and Marvelous El Dorado II. High and Rare Delight: Spiritual Geographic and the Dislocation of the East 1. Conflicted World Visions 2. Columbus, the East, and Millennial Jerusalem III. Richard Hakluyt and the Confusion of Sources IV. World Revised: Francis Bacon and Abraham Ortelius V. Skepticism and Faith: Samuel Purchas, John Donne, and the Composition of Purchas his pilgrimage VI. Toward a Humanist Global History: Purchas and World Historical Discourse VII. Empirical and Prophetic Visions: Milton and the Strands of Renaissance Historiography VIII. Prophetic Universal of Paradise Lost: Paradoxical Triumphs and Designs IX. An Overview: on The End of History and the Patterned Forms of World Historicism: Hegel, Marx, Globalization, and Beyond.

On Ravenstein's Edition of Battell's Adventures in Angola and Loango

Between 1590 and ca. 1610 the English sailor Andrew Battell lived in Central Africa, first in Angola until 1606/07 and then in Loango. His reports about these lands are a priceless source for the otherwise poorly documented history of Angola between ca. 1590-1606, especially since his is the only known eyewitness account about the way of life of the notorious Jaga. He actually lived with one of their bands supposedly for at least twenty months (26-27). In addition his account is also one of the very earliest about Loango. Hence modern historians of Angola and Loango have relied extensively on him. They all, myself included, have used the text edition by E.G. Ravenstein of The Strange Adventures of Andrew Battell of Leigh (London, 1901) and did so without referring back to the original documents. These are, first Battell's information in Samuel Purchas' Purchas His Pilgrimage, or Relations of the World and the Religions observed in all Ages and Places discovered from the Creation unto the Present (London, 1613), and later, the more detailed “The Strange Adventures of Andrew Battell” in Samuel Purchas His Pilgrimes (London, 1625), also known as Hakluytus posthumus after its frontispiece. Given the absolute reliance of modern scholars on Ravenstein, it is worthwhile to evaluate its reliability compared to the original publications.

From Pilgrimage to History: The Renaissance and Global Historicism by John G. Demaray

822 Reviews probably Catholics, most were interested inPossevino as an opponent of their own faith.From the eighteenth century onwards, however, themain motive forcollectors became bibliophily. Balsamo's excellent work, meticulously put together over many years, will be of value forthehistories of thecirculation of Italian books inBritain and of the formation of British libraries. But itshould also be read by anyone interested in the history of the conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism, and in the roles that theprinted book was made toplay in this conflict. UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS BRIAN RICHARDSON From Pilgrimage toHistory: The Renaissance and Global Historicism. By JOHNG. DEMARAY. (AMS Studies in theRenaissance, 41) New York: AMS. 2006. xvi+ 250 pp. $82.50. ISBN 978-o-404-6234i-8. The main purpose of JohnG. Demaray's book is to review the transition inpresenting world history and geography fromaccounts based on theBible to themore empirical studies of later times.The book moves fromRalegh's History of the World, through Bacon, Purchas, andMilton with incidental work on Columbus, Donne, Burton, and others. From the prophecy inParadise Lost of aworld after history, the author looks at later visions of things to come inHegel, Marx, and Fukuyama, finding little to console him. Demaray's scope iswide and his design isbold. The weight given to Samuel Pur chas in this study of the hinge between medieval and modern ismost unusual. If I am unconvinced of the importance of Purchas's sprawling work, I acknowledge that the author isone of the very,very few to tackle its significance as awhole. I question much more stronglywhether Demaray iswell advised inbasing SirWalter Ralegh's linkswith theworld of pilgrimage on his authorship of thebeautiful poem 'The Pas sionateMan's Pilgrimage' (best known for itsopening line, 'Giveme my scallop shell of quiet'). The attribution of this poem toRalegh is extremely tenuous, impossible even. Demaray nevermentions thedialogue poem inwhich a discarded lovermeets a Walsingham pilgrim. This poem is also attributed toRalegh, and, with itsvery close links to 'The Ocean toCynthia', ismuch more definitely his. It admirably demon stratesRalegh's nostalgic linkwith a pre-Reformation past. Instead, 'The Passionate Man's Pilgrimage' is quoted, and quoted only from a i68i version which (in 1951) A. M. C. Latham called 'avery bad text'. It isnot somuch a bad text as a calamitous rewritingof theanonymous i604 poem. This ridiculous text isgiven tous asRalegh' s authoritative work. Demaray toyswith themysterious idea that the speaker of the poem (who is inprison awaiting death) alters the destination of his pilgrimage from Compostella to Jerusalem. It has to be said that this book is full of themost extraordinary errors. The 'A.C. Cronin' of page 33 seems to be the same as theG. R. Crone of the notes (p. I82) who many years ago wrote an important essay on theHereford world map. Abraham Cowley, who was not born until i6i8, iscredited on page 65with having written in i6o6 his poem on Thomas Sprat's history of theRoyal Society.Whatever the source of such errors, theproofs of thisbook appear never tohave been read by publisher or author.There seems tobe no end to mistakes in titles,dates, and spellings. The titleof Townshend's masque, forexample, was not 'Temp Restored' but 'Tempe Restored' (p. 136); Paradise Lost is twicemisquoted on page 122. Such awide and important subject as Demaray's needs the strongest foundations. MLR, I02.3, 2007 823 The constant errorsmust undermine the reader's confidence in the author's argu ments. KENDAL PHILIP EDWARDS 'Macbeth'Multiplied: Negotiating Historical andMedial Difference between Shake speare and Verdi. By CHRISTOPH CLAUSEN. (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, 93) Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 2005. ?58; $70. 285 pp. ISBN 978-90-420-I887-7. This book aims, in its author's words, 'to travel between the two nations of Shake spearean and Verdian criticism' (p. I5), and to treat the play and theopera as 'fields of interpretative possibilities' (p. 2I): itexplicitly refrains from attempting 'a grand overarching theory' (p. 26). The 'historical' and 'medial' differences of the title are both taken seriously. Clausen iswell read in the Jacobean and Risorgimento political preoccupations which, as critics have argued, are the informingcontexts respectively of theplay and of theopera. He also...

The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity (review)

Reviewed by: The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity Thomas Beebee (bio) Ralph Bauer, The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xiii + 295 pp. $65. Ralph Bauer's book, in his own words, "places the transformations in Western knowledge occurring during the early modern period in the geo-political context of European settler colonialism in Spanish and British America from 1500 to 1800" (3). Ultimately, Bauer wishes to reveal through his study-examples [End Page 181] how the "epistemic mercantilism" visited on the New World by the Old was resisted and subverted through the writing of Creole subjects of the Spanish and British empires. His grounding of early American writing in history and geography includes a focus on genres specific to the New World—shipwreck, captivity, and travel—that exceeded Europe's catalog of noteworthy writing. He is adamantly comparative, juxtaposing texts in Spanish and English, treating geographies from Chile to New England, but often against the context of how these were published and read in Europe. Bauer thus reveals a North-South dialectic, in the mutual reading and translation of texts in various languages, as well as an East-West dialectic, where discourses of metropole and periphery contest and mutually condition one another. Bauer's first study example, Cabeza de Vaca's Naufragios, provides a good example of the latter dialectic. Thrown onto the Florida coast as the result of a failed incursion from Santo Domingo in 1528, Cabeza de Vaca survived an eight-year odyssey back to New Spain and eventually to Valladolid, where he published the "Relación" of his adventures seventeen years later. Bauer's chapter on Cabeza de Vaca begins on page 30, but he only turns to the text itself on page 48. In the meantime, Bauer has done a great deal of detail work in order to establish that the publication of the Relación was very much aligned with the policies of Charles V towards the New World, as the emperor attempted to abolish the feudal relations of the encomiendas granted to individual conquistadores in favor of central bureaucratic control by the empire. Bauer's reading of the narrative finds evidence of this bias in, for example, Cabeza de Vaca's warning to the expedition leader to protect the ships and see them to safe harbor, whereas Narváez insists on traveling by horse. Bauer traces the associations of the metaphor of ship with mother and nation, and of horse with the masculine individualist, arguing that this opposition is symbolic of the political struggle between mother Spain and her unruly Creole children. The densely argued reading of the Naufragios takes place in stereo, as key passages are compared against an earlier version to argue for the author's reshaping of the text away from the rugged and violent epic heroism of the conquistadores towards a spiritual autobiography and—Bauer's main point—an image of a centrally administered empire of peace. Cabeza de Vaca provides a smooth segue into the next chapter, since his relation is one of the many to appear in the Hakluytus posthumus of Samuel Purchas (1625), paraphrased and edited to suit the purposes of an author—so Bauer—who reshapes material from a variety of sources into an empirically oriented cultural geography whose heroes were Protestant [End Page 182] British merchants and traders rather than English (or Spanish) freebooters. The chapter returns to Spanish materials with a mention of Garcilaso de la Vega Inca's Comentarios reales as a source of the first-hand experiential account "from below" found as well in John Smith's General Historie of Virginia (1624), two foundational texts for a specifically Creole historiography and prose narrative. (Garcilaso will return as a source for passages of Carrió de la Vandera's work as well.) The innovative and geographically situated nature of captivity narratives has long been recognized, and Bauer examines two of them, Mary Rowlandson and Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán, directly in his next chapter in a good, old-fashioned, point-by-point comparative exercise. The differences between the two texts—length and focus; gender of the narrators; religious...