Decentring the Renaissance

by Warkentin, Germaine; Podruchny, Carolyn

• ISBN13: 9780802081490
• ISBN10: 0802081495
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-01-01
• Publisher: Univ of Toronto Pr

Summary

In 1497, explorers from the confident world of Renaissance Europe sailed, under Captain Giovanni Caboto, into what are now Canadian waters. This significant encounter brought into contact two worlds equally ignorant of each other and set in motion a number of events that culminated in the birth of a new nation. The Renaissance, ordinarily thought of as an entirely European-centred phenomenon is 'de-centred' in these eighteen innovative essays. They explore not only how the European Renaissance helped form Canada, but also how more significantly the experience of Canada touched the Renaissance and those who first came to the shores of North America. Representing a range of disciplines, including literature, anthropology, biology, history, linguistics, and anthropology, this work re-thinks traditional notions of Canada and of the Renaissance. The essays examine both the interaction between the two worlds as well as the ways that this interaction has traditionally been interpreted. As distinct from the rapid transformation of South and Central America, the focus is on the slower northern experience, questioning the European monopoly on history, politics, and science, as well as the misrepresentation of Canada's Aboriginal peoples. Originally presented at a 1996 conference at the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, University of Toronto, these essays provide a wealth of new information and a variety of new perspectives on the collision of the Old World with the New.

Author Biography

Germaine Warkentin is Professor Emeritus of English, University of Toronto. Carolyn Podruchny is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History, University of Winnipeg.

Table of Contents

Illustrations	ix
Preface	xi
Introduction: `Other Land Existing'	3	(16)
Germaine Warkentin
Carolyn Podruchny
Part I: Methods
Polarities, Hybridities: What Strategies for Decentring?	19	(14)
Natalie Zemon Davis
Inclusive and Exclusive Perceptions of Difference: Native and Euro-Based Concepts of Time, History, and Change	33	(15)
Deborah Doxtator
Plunder or Harmony? On Merging European and Native Views of Early Contact	48	(20)
Toby Morantz
Memoria as the Place of Fabrication of the New World	68	(19)
Gilles Therien
Part II: Mentalites / Debwewin
The Sixteenth-Century French Vision of Empire: The Other Side of Self-Determination	87	(23)
Olive Patricia Dickason
The Mentality of the Men behind Sixteenth-Century Spanish Voyages to Terranova	110	(15)
Selma Huxley Barkham
Relocating Terra Firma: William Vaughan's Newfoundland	125	(16)
Anne Lake Prescott
Images of English Origins in Newfoundland and Roanoke	141	(18)
Mary C. Fuller
From the Good Savage to the Degenerate Indian: The Amerindian in the Accounts of Travel to America	159	(14)
Real Ouellet
Mylene Tremblay
Part III: Translatio fide
Few, Uncooperative, and Ill Informed? The Roman Catholic Clergy in French and British North America, 1610-1658	173	(13)
Luca Codignola
Canada in Seventeenth-Century Jesuit Thought: Backwater or Opportunity?	186	(14)
Peter A. Goddard
`A New Loreto in New France': Pierre-Joseph-Marie Chaumonot, SJ, and the Holy House of Loreto	200	(23)
Andre Sanfacon
Part IV: Decentring at Work
The Delights of Nature in This New World: A Seventeenth-Century Canadian View of the Environment	223	(13)
Lynn Berry
The Beginning of French Exploration out of the St Lawrence Valley: Motives, Methods, and Changing Attitudes towards Native People	236	(16)
Conrad E. Heidenreich
The Earliest European Encounters with Iroquoian Languages	252	(10)
Wallace Chafe
Decentring Icons of History: Exploring the Archaeology of the Frobisher Voyages and Early European-Inuit Contact	262	(25)
Reginald Auger
William W. Fitzhugh
Lynda Gullason
Anne Henshaw
Donald Hogarth
Dosia Laeyendecker
Sir William Phips and the Decentring of Empire in Northeastern North America, 1690-1694	287	(18)
Emerson W. Baker
John G. Reid
Part V: Afterword
Amerindians and the Horizon of Modernity	305	(14)
Denys Delage
Jean-Philippe Warren
Works Cited	319	(36)
Contributors	355	(6)
Index	361