Writing Europe in Renaissance France: Travels in Reality and Imagination

Niall Oddy’s wide-ranging and comparative study carefully explores the emergence of ‘Europe’ as a marker of the political, cultural and religious unity that had been expressed before the Reformation by ‘Christendom’, and questions how, at a time of uncertainty and division, Europe is understood. For French writers travelling within and beyond Europe in imagination or reality, and exploring the other in an attempt to understand the self, reflections on Europe inevitably inflect the vexed question of national identity during the Wars of Religion. The book’s five chapters examine sixteenth-century France’s most notable ‘elsewheres’: the world, Brazil, the Ottoman Empire, the Mediterranean and Geneva.

Chapter one demonstrates how Rabelais Quart Livre unsettles the idyllic view, in the cosmographies by Peter Apian and Sebastian Münster, of Europe—civilized, fertile and Christian—as culturally and geographically superior. Rabelais ‘Europe’, appearing only once in the Quart Livre, is vast and too vague to establish identity, and its rich classical heritage is in ruins; his fictive islands, fragmented into exclusive societies, redraw cosmography’s geographical boundaries along cultural and ideological divisions. Where cosmography imposes order and meaning, Rabelais uses the cosmographical form to offer multiple perspectives, echoing his protagonists’ quest for pluralism and tolerance.

Similarly, chapter two compares Montaigne’s ‘Des Cannibales’, containing the sole instance of ‘Europe’ in the Essais, with André Thevet’s account, in the Singularitez, of his journey to Brazil. Thevet’s ‘Europe’ equates the French with the Spanish and Portuguese, represented as models of colonialism, and so promotes France’s nation-building ambitions. Montaigne avoids ‘Europe’, preferring a flexible and unspecified ‘nous’, and challenges the lexis through which Thevet legitimizes European superiority and conquest. By giving shifting senses to terms such as ‘sauvage’ and ‘barbare’, Montaigne casts doubt on the language and methods used to promote cultural values in cosmography, criticized as a static genre in a changing world.

Chapter three explores the representation of Constantinople in the political treatises of François Savary de Brèves and in the poetry of Ronsard. Ronsard perceives the Ottoman Empire as a political and cultural threat to Christian Europe and to France, imagined as leading a crusade against the Turks or glorified as the new home of the Muses exiled from Ottoman Greece. Savary de Brèves accepts the legitimacy of the Ottoman Empire and the advantages of trading with it: he recognizes the value of François I’s military alliance with Suleiman (which Ronsard conveniently forgets) and the cultural exchanges to which the circulation of goods and people leads. He thus evokes a malleable border with the Turks that complicates the shaping of Europe by opposition to the Ottoman Empire.

Chapter four turns to the Mediterranean, representing Europe’s geographical and cultural border and a place of trade and co-operation, and considers the classification of its islands. Cosmographers’ flexible allocation of islands problematize the continental divide and suggest that Europe’s boundaries are cultural: Catholic Malta is European for Münster but African for François de Belleforest, while Orthodox Crete is Asian for Thevet but European for Belleforest, along with Greece and Muscovy, similarly excluded from a Europe defined by Latin Christianity. In contrast, the travel narratives by Thevet and Nicolas de Nicolay focus on cross-cultural understanding: where cosmography gives geographical boundaries cultural meaning, travellers see places more individually and boundaries as more porous.

Chapter five examines the separation between religious and national identities in two Protestant writers, Jean de Léry and Théodore-Agrippa d’Aubigné. As d’Aubigné rejects the unity of ‘Chrestienté’, which erases rather than respects religious difference, and despairs of national reconciliation under a Catholic Henri IV, he calls instead for a unified Protestant Europe. Léry avoids ‘Chrestienté’, since it excludes Protestants, and his ‘Europe’, functioning only for comparison with the New World, offers no unity or identity. His nostalgia for Brazil is a lament over a divided France and a missed opportunity, since America has become another Catholic-dominated Europe. As both Henri IV and Brazil fail to provide a community that is both confessional and national, d’Aubigné and Léry take refuge in Geneva, choosing religion over nation in a Europe that no longer aligns both.

Through these detailed comparisons of diverse genres and journeys, Oddy uncovers a rich array of perspectives on and meanings of ‘Europe’. He shows that continental identity matters more to cosmographers, seeking to define Europe through opposition to elsewhere, than to travellers, real or imaginary, and that sympathetic imagination can do more than actual travel to alter perceptions about alterity. He highlights the significance of lexical choices: d’Aubigné prefers ‘Chrestienté’ to ‘Europe’, since religion is his theme, whereas Ronsard prefers ‘Europe’ for its classical and Christian culture, while Rabelais and Montaigne avoid ‘Europe’ as dogmatic. Through these rich and thoughtful readings, successfully and originally bringing together genres not generally considered in relation to each other, Oddy convincingly shows that there is no shared European view of the world, nor even a shared early modern view of Europe.