Tag Archives: History Dissertation

The Lotus-Eaters

The Lotus-Eaters – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, comparing the benefits of pleasure with the rewards of good work.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane—Sources:Photo: © Juan Valentín CC BY-NC 4.0 https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/427040191. No modifications made. Available under public license. Image slightly cropped length-wise for podcast episode art.[1] André Thevet, Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique, (Antwerp, 1558), 4v ; Aristotle, Situations and Names of Winds 973b, 12–13.[2] Homer, Odyssey 9.106–110, trans. Robert Fagles, (Penguin, 1996), 214.[3] Homer, Odyssey 9.110–117, trans. Fagles, 214.[4] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1118a.[5] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1118a, 8.

Photo: Ziziphus lotus, © Juan Valentín CC BY-NC 4.0 https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/427040191. No modifications made. Available under public license.

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This week, comparing the benefits of pleasure with the rewards of good work.

A recurring challenge of my life is finding a good work-life balance. Perhaps central to this conundrum is the fact that I simply enjoy the work that I do, so I’m more willing to approach something work-related at all hours because it brings me joy. There are plenty of things that I need to do with my time, and plenty more that I know I will someday accomplish, yet I feel less pressed to push through any weariness or writer’s block to finish a given project today than I have in the past. For most things, I have a wide enough gap leading up to project deadlines that I can afford to work as I will on a given project. This is a luxury of the moment, which was foreign to me even a year ago, and I know well that the ample time I have now is a singular moment in my life that will likely not repeat often again. So, as long as I have the time to spend working on the Wednesday Blog and the handful of articles and book chapters that I’m writing, I’ll use that time to the best of my ability.

Each of us operates within the structures of our civilization, and within the cultural edifices built up over millennia that define our very identities. No one exists in true solitude everyone comes from somewhere. There are plenty of stories of loosening the burdens of life for the splendid abandon. Life is hard for all of us; one of the great unifying factors of the human experience is struggle. I doubt that either the richest or the poorest people alive today are fully happy and content in their present state. There are certainly things I would like to change about my life, things that I’m now approaching with the same resolve that I dedicate to my work and I see that among my family and friends too, such potent dedication to completing tasks difficult and easy alike that when all is said and done the doer can rest proud of their work.

Still, there is value to taking time to rest. I’ve developed a bad habit of sitting at my desk until I’m so tired that I can’t sit up straight, or even to the point that I find one eye closing so that I can keep reading with the other. These make for good stories but they’re bad habits overall. It seems to me like there’s so much to learn and not enough time to commit it all. We Americans are particularly bad at our work-life balance. While we have a strong work ethic in this country, we don’t give ourselves enough time to enjoy the fruits of our labor. I now work at some of the places where otherwise I would go to rest, places like the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts where when I returned to Kansas City in December 2022, I was a frequent patron of the Kansas City Symphony’s performances until March 2023 when I signed on as a Team Captain of the Volunteer Usher Corps. Now, I work at the Kauffman Center and while I don’t get to relax and soak in the music there anymore, I’m proud of the work that I do and I work with people who I genuinely enjoy being around. In fact, working at the Kauffman Center has magnified the value of my historical research and writing even more. That’s what I love most in all the things that I do because it’s what I’m best at, and it’s through academia that I’ve met some of the people I most admire in all the world. The last two months then when I singularly devoted my attention to researching, writing, and editing a new and better introduction to my dissertation I poured all my effort and energy into the task and the work shows it. Yet I also drained myself of that same strength and realized that the working hours I kept four years ago when I was reading 12 hours a day in preparation for my comprehensive exams were no longer tenable. Life moves on, and with the changes in my life so too my stamina for these sorts of long hours have changed. I’m doing a lot more now than I was during the height of the pandemic in January, February, and March of 2021. Thus, it’s reasonable to say that I cannot do quite as much of the same things that I once did.

There are times when I can get so caught up in what it is I’m doing in the moment that I miss the world going by. I mourn a little bit how fast 2025 has been for me, there are things I wish I had done in the first half of this year that I failed to do for one reason or another. Often those reasons were out of my control. Yet they remain monuments to things that could have been. In other cases, though those things are goals which I turned away after finding better things to pursue. I’ve learned that I must remain open to change, flexible in my ways of living and doing things. How many times have I thought I was done with my dissertation only to be told that there was still more work to do? I know that endeavor defines my career and will continue to do so as long as I’m contributing to the scholarship of Renaissance natural history. Still, at times the idea of abandoning my efforts and falling into a state of rest has its appeal. At this moment, I would appreciate a vacation, even if only 24 hours away from my work. I took some time to enjoy the friendly company of my brother Hibernians and their families, and my Gaelgeoir friends this weekend at the Kansas City Irish Fest. It was lovely using that time to be with people whose company I enjoy, yet it was just as great a joy to return to my work this week and especially now that I’ve finished this round of work on my dissertation’s introduction to return to editing my translation of André Thevet’s 1557 book Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique. I had a delightful day spent reading through the Loeb Classical Library and the Perseus database hunting down Thevet’s Greek and Roman references on the geography, ethnography, and zoology of Sub-Saharan Africa.

The legacy of those ancient authors lies heavy on the European perception of their southern neighbors. The Greeks especially perceived Libya, their name for Africa, as the great desert landmass on the southern edge of their world. Thevet wrote that Libya was named by the Greeks for the southwestern wind, or Lips (Λίψ), a notion he got from Aristotle’s book the Situations and Names of Winds.[1] Thus, while Libya was the Greek name for Africa as a whole in antiquity, that the name was associated more with the southwest than the south suggests that their notion of Libya was west of Egypt and in the general vicinity today known as Libya. Further west along the Mediterranean coast of Africa lay an island where Homer records that Odysseus’s ship made a beachhead born by the north wind across what Robert Fagles translates as “the fish-infested sea.” On the tenth day “our squadron reached the land of the Lotus-eaters,” who Homer described as “people who eat the lotus, mellow fruit and flower.” Odysseus’s crewmen “snatched a meal by the swift ships” and found as “they mingled among the natives” that they “lost all desire” to do their duties 

“much less return

their only wish to linger there with the Lotus-eaters,

grazing on lotus, all memory of the journey home

dissolved forever.”[2]

The lotus-eaters of the Odyssey who live in bliss induced by the plant. Their worries carried far away they could bask in the glow of their sun and live out their days in a sense of peace. Yet Odysseus saw in this idyll a great distraction from what must be done, he and his crew needed to still return home to Ithaca. The king in his wisdom continued his story,

“But I brought them back, back

To the hollow ships, and streaming tears––I forced them,

Hauled them under the rowing benches, lashed them fast

And shouted out commands to my other, steady comrades:

‘Quick, no time to lose, embark in the racing ships!’––

So none could eat the lotus, forget the voyage home.”[3] (9.92-117)

The danger lay less in an immediate threat to life and limb but rather in a threat to mission, to vocation. Odysseus knew his charge was to shepherd as many of his men home as he could; what a tragedy it was that after all his efforts he returned home alone. The threat of the lotus-eaters lay in their carefree abandon of the need of self-preservation. Eventually, had the King of Ithaca and his men stayed on the island they would have faded in body and in spirit, dying not in war but by becoming stale and wasting away slowly until they had not even their memory to keep alive. Too much of a good thing becomes a bad thing, just as everything changes over the long dance of time.

Moderation then is the best way of living, to do things such that we humans not only survive but thrive in the conditions in which we find ourselves. Aristotle expresses this best in his Nicomachean Ethics that for every sort of action or feeling there is an excess and a deficiency and between them a mean which is the moral virtue. Thus, the lotus-eaters lived in a state of self-indulgent excess, born from their love of the lotus plant and the way it can make all their troubles disappear.[4] Aristotle argued that “temperance and profligacy are concerned with those pleasures which man shares with the lower animals, and which consequently appear slavish and bestial.”[5] It is human to have passions, desires, and urges to do one thing over another, yet it is an entirely different thing to give into those passions and abandon control over one’s own life. I think it is a greater sorrow to give up this control thoughtlessly than it is to have that control taken from you, even if the act of subjugation remains in the eye of the subduer and only as powerful as society wills it to be. This is something we too often forget: so many of the bad things that go on in our world are things of our own making. We choose to allow rampant gun violence in our country, or to let the institutions of our democracy crumble, or to let people go hungry, die from treatable diseases, and remain illiterate all because people in positions of power benefit from having others in need. I suspect that we don’t have to live like this. Perhaps the root of these societal woes comes from an understandable inability to understand death, that final act of life which often is so very unfair to the dying and those left behind. So long as the greatest inequity exists then why should we bother with trying to fix our own problems?Dear reader, I’ve been writing this Wednesday Blog now for four and a half years, and I’ve always said that my one rule for this publication is that I will end it once it’s no longer fun to write. Just before the pandemic during a family gathering, one of my uncles remarked that he had no interest in retiring soon because he loves the work he does. This struck me because it explains why I’ve stuck around in academia in spite of all the trouble I’ve been through in these past few years. I do this work because I love it; I write because I enjoy writing, and I’m writing to you today to suggest that we could make our world a better place to live for ourselves and our children and grandchildren who’ll come after us, we just have to leave the island and its lotuses and climb back into our boat and set out onto the fish-infested sea again. For all that I’ve learned about a great many topics, I still often need reminding to do basic things like stop reading or writing late at night and go to bed. I suspect that’s the case for most of us, that we get caught up in the worries or passions of the day and lose sight of the good things that we can do to really find true peace. Here in the United States the first big step that we ought to take is reconsider how we prioritize work to such a degree that it becomes life itself. We ought to work to live, not live to work. On this Labor Day week that’s as good a starting place as any.

[1] André Thevet, Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique, (Antwerp, 1558), 4v ; Aristotle, Situations and Names of Winds 973b, 12–13.

[2] Homer, Odyssey 9.106–110, trans. Robert Fagles, (Penguin, 1996), 214.

[3] Homer, Odyssey 9.110–117, trans. Fagles, 214.

[4] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1118a.

[5] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1118a, 8.

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New Worlds

New Worlds – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I reflect on the flexibility of the word world.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

This week, I reflect on the flexibility of the word world.

In my field the focus is often on nomenclature as much as it is on the history itself. We, early modern historians of the Atlantic are left dealing with the original intent of our historical subjects while also reckoning with the legacies of their choices in the living world today. That word world is one such central question, after all what does it really mean? In a twenty-first century context the world is synonymous with the Earth itself. I see in the sixteenth century the creation of the current state when the world can be a planetary designation. For past generations the world was something smaller, at most hemispheric yet more often regional in character. André Thevet’s use of the French word sauvage to define the alterity of those beyond his own world in turn set boundaries about his own world, what he wrote about was a Christian world centered on the Mediterranean that was a natural outgrowth of the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome.

I am hesitant then to use the term New World in my dissertation. Sure, it was a term in use in the sixteenth century, popularized by Peter Martyr d’Anghiera (1457–1526), yet in our time it’s gained enough shackles from the dark legacies of the conquest and colonization of these continents that I want to be conscious of my twenty-first century readers even as I seek to place my historical narrative in the sixteenth century. Thus, I argue instead that this new world was created by the conquest and colonization, that it is a new global world born from the encounter between the many old worlds that came before. This follows the arguments made by Marcy Norton concerning a Mesoamerican classical past to which the Spanish in particular looked when placing their new administration upon the remains of the old over the indigenous societies in present day Mexico.[1] I see in how Thevet described the one part of the Americas that was fully colonized in 1556, namely the island of Hispaniola, a new world in all its novelty and experimentation.

I grew up knowing of the Americas as the New World, it’s one term I remember hearing very early on in my youth. Even then, I felt a sense of reluctance at it, after all new things aren’t necessarily all good, so does that mean our New World is in fact worse off than the Old? Most of my family only arrived in the United States in the last four to five generations, at the time within the last century, and so for us America was still in some ways new. I treasure the stories my dad told me as a young boy about Chicago, where we lived; those stories were likely my introduction to history that led slowly toward the career I’ve now chosen. Even now, if I’m looking for something fun to read it will often be something about my hometown as it was a century ago. In 2024 I spent many happy hours engrossed in Jay Kirk’s biography of Carl Akeley (1864–1926), and a few months later once it was released I read eagerly Paul Brinkman’s Now is the Time to Collect about the Field Museum’s 1896 expedition to Africa. Granted, both deal with the same subject, the museum where my own curiosity was first sparked as a young kid, yet they are mementos of that same nostalgia that draws me back into what I thought of when first I considered this term New World. It speaks to Churchill’s famous final rousing word of hope in his “We shall fight on the beaches” speech that Britain need hold out “until in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and liberation of the Old.”[2] This dichotomy between the youthful New World and our older cousins across the water is echoed in Bernard-Henri Lévy’s 2018 book The Empire and the Five Kings about the decline of American geopolitical power in the present century. Lévy wrote of America, the Empire, as the sons of Aeneas who several generations ago returned east to the Old World to liberate it as Churchill hoped. Yet now, the imperial sons of Aeneas are themselves fattened by their spoils of victory and incapable of meeting the struggles of the current moment as the threats are multiple and not focused on one rival superpower as they were for much of the last century.

Perhaps this is the key facet of this whole conundrum now: not only is the world so diffuse as to merit multiple definitions, but it reflects the uneasy global world in which we all live. For me the disquiet in all this comes just as much from the fact that the benefits which our interconnectedness ought to have brought––peace, economic, political, and social prosperity, greater human solidarity––are still mired in the same old problems of greed, small mindedness, and war as ever. We live in the shadow of Cain as much as in the warm glow of that optimism which keeps the home fires burning. We are at a place in our development as a species where disease, hunger, poverty, and war could all be avoided or cured on the sociopolitical level. We merely lack the will to do any of that. The optimistic promise of this New World which I perceived as a kid in Chicago remains but one vision of our shared reality. The New World into which I was born is built on the remnants of those old worlds that were often assimilated with violent force.I like to find the positive, if possible. When I was considering what I wanted to pursue in my doctoral studies I looked at what my friends were doing and first decided that I didn’t want to do something that would be depressing or sad. I wanted instead to focus on something that would fuel my curiosity and that connected back to those things which I’ve been most interested in throughout my life. I chose to study André Thevet’s sloth because the idea of being a sloth historian made me laugh. Now, with my first peer-reviewed article on the subject published with the journal Terrae Incognitae I feel that the work of these last six years is finally paying off.[3] That work considers the creation of a New World, while balancing contemporary sentiments around that term with historical perceptions of the same. I am after all someone who studies the past for the benefit of illuminating something as of yet uncovered about my subject. That said, I’m writing for readers living now and, in the future, and need to bear their perspectives in mind. That’s at the core of any communication: we learn foreign languages in order to communicate with people from other cultures, countries, and even worlds. I know that my writing is tinged with my own idiolect, yet I hope it remains universal enough to be understood by anyone who is curious enough to read it.

[1] Marcy Norton, The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals After 1492, (Harvard University Press, 2024), 305-313.

[2] Hansard HC Deb 04 June 1940 vol 361 cc787-98.

[3] Seán Thomas Kane, “A Sloth in the First French Colony in the Americas,” Terrae Incognitae 57, no. 3 (2025): 1–15.

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