This week, bringing together my research and my life through wine.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane—Sources:%5B1%5D Thevet, Singularitez, 14v.%5B2%5D Thevet, Singularitez, 15r.%5B3%5D Thevet, Singularitez, 159r.%5B4%5D Thevet, Singularitez, 15v.%5B5%5D Émile Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française, 4 vols., (Paris, 1873-1877) s.v. « mignol. »[6] Florike Egmond, Eye for Detail: Images of Plants and Animals in Art and Science, 1500-1630, (Reaktion Books, 2017), 30; Mackenzie Cooley, The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance, (University of Chicago Press, 2022), 101.[7] Thevet, Singularitez, 18v.[8] Thevet, Singularitez, 19r.[9] Thevet, Singularitez, 19v.[10] Thevet, Singularitez, 19v-20r.[11] Homer, Odyssey 9.403, trans. Fagles.
This week, bringing together my research and my life through wine.
As I progress in my efforts to prepare my translation of André Thevet’s (1516-1590) Singularitez de la France Antarctique for publication, I find myself often laughing at Thevet’s own comments about his world and the worlds he visited on his 1555 voyage from France to Brazil and his 1556 voyage home (the one with the whales). Thevet was a Frenchman through and through, yet while he referred to “our countrymen” on several occasions in the Singularitez he more often identifies himself alongside other Europeans as Christians, distinguishing them from the African and Amerindian peoples he described in various forms of other. Thevet used the broadest possible perspective to craft a story which would resonate with his reader, a story which told of the influence and impact of his fellow Christians from “our Europe” upon these distant worlds across the “Ocean Sea.” I like Thevet’s perspective because as contemporary to the middle of the sixteenth century it is, it still feels contemporary to our own time all the same. If the frontiers of mapped knowledge were just beyond the Atlantic and Pacific shores of the Americas in Thevet’s time, today they lie in the vastness of Space above us. The parallels between the First Age of Exploration to which Thevet contributed and our own Second Age of Exploration now underway are many and ought to be explored further in academic scholarship.
I’ve long loved reading about explorers, pioneers, and settlers. Over the weekend then, when I drove west with my Dad to Hutchinson, Kansas for the 2025 State Convention of the Kansas Ancient Order of Hibernians I made a point of us going to visit the Cosmosphere, one of Hutchinson’s jewels. This museum of spacecraft, memorabilia, and historical artifacts from the 1940s through the end of the Cold War is something worth visiting if you’re in Central Kansas. We’d been there before in about 2007 or 2008 with my Boy Scout Troop to do our Astronomy merit badge. The rest of the weekend was spent enjoying the company of our brother Hibernians and their wives, and in a long business meeting on Saturday in the Strataca Salt Mine Museum just outside of town. While I was in Hutchinson, I made a point of continuing my work on typing out the French original of the 1558 Antwerp edition of Thevet’s book for my impending book proposal. The chapter I worked on in Hutchinson, “On Palm Wine” was one such boozy treatise that made me laugh.
Thevet diverted on several occasions from his cosmographic endeavors of describing the botany, ethnography, geography, and zoology of these places to rest instead on their local wine, or wine substitute. He began these series of diversions on Madeira, still today famous for its wine, “which is first among all other fruits of usage.” Thevet made his case concerning wine plain from the start, writing of the Madeiran variety that it is “necessity for human life.” Vines grow on Madeira, Thevet wrote, because “wine and sugar have an affinity for Madeira’s temperature.”[1] Its wine is comparable to Cretan wine and “the most celebrated wines of Chios and Lesbos,” which Thevet identified as Mitylene. Here, he equated a modern creation, the plantation of Portuguese vines into the soils of Madeira, to the famed wines of antiquity which were prized by the Greeks, Romans, and Persians alike.[2] Thevet couched his qualifications of the greatness of modern things on their parallels with or roots in antiquity. A humanist, Thevet’s cosmography was reliant on these classical framings to assess the proper place and due of these things of which were “secrets most admirable, of which the ancients were not advised.”[3] Maderian wine was better aged, Thevet wrote, “for they let it rest under the ardor of the Sun kept with the times so that it doesn’t keep the natural heat in the wine.”[4] In a place such as this warm enough where sugar cane could be planted in January, Thevet found a paradise where even he and his countrymen could appreciate the local grape.
Two chapters later, as Thevet moved on to describe the coastline around the Cap-Vert in Senegal, the westernmost promontory of Africa and the place whence the island Republic of Cabo Verde derives its name, he stopped again to discuss their local drink, in this case palm wine. Thevet recorded an indigenous name for this drink, Mignol in his Singularitez, which Émile Littré’s Dictionnaire de la langue française recorded is a “spirited liquor extracted from a species of palm.”[5] Perhaps then, Thevet’s use of the term may be the first introduction of this word into French. He writes, with a hint of a sigh that “the vine is unfamiliar to this country where it has not been planted and diligently cultivated,” resulting in a dearth of wine and the preference for liquors extracted from palm trees. This makes wine one of the most human of inventions, something that needs labor to be crafted out of natural things. It is a bridge between the twin categories of collected objects in the cabinets of curiosities of Thevet’s time: artificalia, that which was made by human hands, and naturalia, that which was made by God.[6] While the palm “is itself a marvelously beautiful tree and well accomplished, larger than many others and perpetually verdant” Thevet contended that its fruit still requires less cultivation and work than the fruit of the vine or barley.[7] “This wine is excellent but offensive to the head,” he wrote, noting that it “needs a hot country and grows in glassy sand like salt, lest its roots end up salting when it is planted.”[8] Unlike grape wines, palm wine is “prone to corruption” because, Thevet wrote, “humidity rises in this liqueur.”[9] It is similar in color “as the white wines of Champagne and Anjou and tastes better than the ciders of Brittany, helping the locals who are subjected to continuous and excessive heat.”[10] I infer in here a slight toward the Bretons, who were only recently made subjects of the French crown in 1547 upon the coronation of Henry II of France as both King of France and Duke of Brittany.
Thevet’s point is that while alcohol can come in other forms than just the fruit of the vine, that is far superior to any other drink. I myself prefer wine, especially reds from Chinon, Rioja, and the Burgenland. I’ve had my fair few opportunities to enjoy a glass or two, or perhaps more. Polyphemus put it well when he cried out that Odysseus’s full-bodied wine must be “nectar, ambrosia [which] flows from heaven!”[11] The holy vines whence come wine carry into Christianity and in particular the Catholic and Orthodox traditions. Through transubstantiation the wine becomes the Blood of Christ. To me, this is the greatest mystery of the Faith, or at least the greatest mystery of our liturgy and rite. I find it amusing that other churches have non-alcoholic grape juice rather than wine fill this role, as in our Catholic culture there’s a certain degree of pride in the fact that we use wine proper, and that everyone partakes (if they so choose) in that wine as early as 8 years old at their First Communion. I for one think that a gradual introduction to alcohol within the right guarded circumstances can be healthy; this at least avoids the taboo that can lead to underage drinking as an act of rebellion. Yet by making drink a central tenant of our ritual life, we give it a clear place where it should remain and distinguish it from those places where it should be avoided. For instance, I customarily only drink whiskey in toasts at weddings and funerals or other special events. It’s not something that I want to have on a regular basis.
This regularity is central to our society’s relationship with alcohol. I grew up with the image of drink being embodied in the alcoholic model of Fr. Jack Hackett, played with a finesse by the late great Frank Kelly on the Channel 4 sitcom Father Ted in the 1990s. Fr. Jack’s favorite word was “drink!” always said in an exclamatory manner. Drink has its charms to be sure, yet like anything it should be taken in measure. Too much and you lose control of yourself or even your sense of self all together. Too little and you cannot really enjoy it. A century ago, American society responded to alcoholism by trying to stifle its main fuel through prohibition. The 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibited the sale of alcohol, yet it was hardly effective in this effort. One of the funnier papers I wrote in my undergraduate made the satirical case that Catholicism has advantages over Protestantism because we didn’t think that Prohibition would actually work. Granted, we are the Church that had the Index of Prohibited Books, so we all make mistakes. I think a similar mistake can be made in the idea of wholesale prohibition of actions and things that are controversial today. I for one am more in favor of restricting gun sales, yet a ban simply would not work in the United States. Likewise, my Church is a loud and vocal advocate for the prohibition of abortion. In both cases, these feel like measures at undertaking a complicated surgery with a battleaxe. Instead, let’s consider the underlying societal causes of these issues and address those. Let’s bring together this country’s finest minds, experts in their fields, and have them work together to find a solution that will improve our lives and leave this a better place for our descendants to live.I do enjoy a good glass of wine. I’ve had both good wine and the bad wine to compare it to. I’ve drunk wines so bad that they make your typical communion wine taste like a nice, aged vintage. A good glass of wine elevates a meal for me. On New Year’s Eve during my prix fixe dinner at Paros, a Greek restaurant in Leawood, Kansas, I enjoyed a well-rounded Cretan red with at least one of my five courses. At the end of the meal after the lamb shanks and the octopus and the baklava and everything else I was so content that I didn’t feel the need to continue the festivities. Rather, I let the rest of the night pass by in peace and quiet. A good drink can add in the sweetness of the day, an evening’s amber glow that could just as easily be missed. It remarks on the passing opportunities that if only we saw them we might make different decisions that would make our lives even just a little bit better.
This week, recent events have inspired me to think about the wide, wide world on a smaller scale.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane—Click here to buy a copy of my book Travels in Time Across Europe which tells the stories from my year living in London that began 10 years ago this week.
This week, recent events have inspired me to think about the wide, wide world on a smaller scale.
Last Wednesday, after publishing “On Democracy, Part II” I took my place in the driver’s seat of my car, the Mazda Rua, and went out on a day trip to Jefferson City to join the protest against the congressional redistricting underway here in Missouri. I wanted to drive long distance at highway speeds again like I used to four times a year on my Long Drives East and West between Kansas City and Binghamton. There’s a lot of little things about those drives that I miss now that I’m more rooted here in Brookside. Today, I don’t drive every day. Often times if I can I’ll choose to walk to wherever I want to go in the neighborhood. It’s healthier to be sure, and I get the same free time away from the obligations that crowd my desk to listen to music, podcasts, birdsong, or to just think. These walks aren’t terribly taxing, Apple Fitness likes to remind me that the difficulty is “easy” to “moderate,” yet each one adds up into a sum which says that I am healthier today in mid-September than I was in mid-February or mid-March, let alone a year ago now. Moreover, I loved driving even just about town for that free time. Drivetime was often my podcast time. Now, I’m also reassured that I’m not operating a large and potentially dangerous vehicle while I’m listening to an engaging conversation or story; instead, I can focus on the story itself and not split my attention between that and the road.
So, last Wednesday I did try to recreate the things I loved most about those road trips that marked the beginning of this decade. On the outbound drive I listened to a fascinating discussion about political philosophy and space policy on Planetary Radio and on my return trip I listened to the pilot of the new audio drama Star Trek: Khan. Yet as much as I was thrilled to be back on the road and experiencing things that I felt like I had lost, even at my own volition, I still found that some of the little things got to me. For one, I was annoyed at getting stuck behind a semi-truck on the outbound drive for about 10 miles east of Sedalia and even more frustrated that I couldn’t pass a pair of semis that were ahead of me on the return drive as we transitioned from the two-lane divided highway in Cole County back to the one-lane country road that is US 50 in between the state capital and Sedalia. I know well that I control how I react to things, and therefore that I ought to react better to most things today than I did in my younger years, yet getting stuck behind those larger, slower vehicles on the stretch where passing was far more difficult really annoyed me. The beauty of a country drive is lost somewhat when you’re staring at the same big box retailer’s advertisement on the back of their vehicle for mile after mile.
These little things are what give our experiences life. The great, grand gestures that get remembered are one thing, yet they cannot be sustained without the small tokens of affection or whispered advice that comes from living and making the choices that define who we are. I believe that we are fundamentally formed by our experiences for good or ill. I’ve often ended up resorting to grand actions to try and solve questions or puzzles that find their way onto my desk. Marking something off a checklist is one of the most satisfying things I can do in my life. Those grand acts often become boxes which I can fill with the little things that I undertake. Currently, I am working on editing my translation of André Thevet’s (1516–1590) book Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique to send its book proposal off to an academic press. I have enough of my translation edited to send to them now, the first 16 chapters to be precise, yet there’s more still I need to do. This publisher prints page-facing translations and requires that the original text be sent alongside the translation. So, now I am spending my time typing out the original Middle French text of these first 16 chapters to be included in my proposal. There is a Wikisource page for this book, taken from the 1878 French edition that I could copy and paste from, yet it lacks the folio numbers from the original that are vital signposts to navigate the text and has enough nineteenth-century re-renderings of the sixteenth-century French original that I decided it was better if I just went ahead and typed it out myself. The first chapter took me about an hour to do, so I figure in all I might be able to have most of this typing done by the time I publish The Wednesday Blog next week.
Each character here is a little thing that together add up to the surviving thoughts and memories of a man who lived 450 years ago who exists in the scholarly memory of his time yet rarely in the spotlight. In my work, I hope to turn that spotlight on him and demonstrate his erudition and centrality to the cosmographic profession as it existed in the 1550s and 1560s. All this boils down to the same solution I’ve used to get through big projects for years. On Monday I smiled hearing a friend say essentially the same thing with her work in the history of mathematics, that the best way to solve a problem is to break it down into its constituent parts and figure it out piece by piece. A decade ago, this week when I moved to London, I found that the only way that the move was not overwhelming was to think of each thing I needed to do separately. My frustration rose when I found that I couldn’t make sense of a particular facet of one of the things I needed to do. One particular moment of note here was when I was summoned to the international student office to provide visa papers to confirm that I could legally study in the United Kingdom well after I’d started my coursework. Something got lost in the shuffle, but it was serious enough to scare me a little. When I moved to Binghamton, I had similar bureaucratic problems from issues getting my New York residency owing to my Missouri driver’s license having cracked in two, to a year later having big issues proving my residency to my university because I forgot to cross a t somewhere on a form.
Again, I choose how I react, and in the years since I’ve learned to take little things in stride and think of them in the broader context in which they exist. I believe doing the little things can show fidelity to a greater cause because it shows that I’m there for the long run, not just in the good moments. That’s something I learned from Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting, one of the finest movies I’ve ever seen. I think perhaps the best metaphor to explain what I’m trying to say to you, dear Reader, is that we should approach the things in life like we approach cooking. Recipes break down the task of cooking into smaller pieces that are more easily attainable. In May I made an Easter roast for some of my best friends that comprised several recipes I’d never tried before that day, and I truly didn’t know if it had worked until I finally sat down and took a bite of it. The roasted lamb shanks were perfect, as were the mashed potatoes, and the flourless chocolate cake that I rounded things out with was excellent and just as good the following day. In each recipe, I not only took things one at a time but even experimented a bit here or there based on my own experience from cooking similar things. For one, I had to quickly rethink how I was going to cook the lamb shanks because they were larger than nearly all of the pans I had. For another, I realized later than I wanted that in melting the chocolate chips for the cake I should’ve encouraged the process along with a spatula here and there. Each of these little things rounded out with a fine Tempranillo wine from Rioja to make one of the best dinners I’ve yet cooked.
I have a lot to do right now, and in every respect I’m on course to complete the things I have in my docket. The work would be overwhelming if I looked at it as a great mass, yet it is far easier to approach in small bites. That’s the big reason why I’m ending the Wednesday Blog one month from this week on 15 October. I’ve said what I wanted to say, and looking ahead I can use the time that I devote to writing this blog and recording the podcast working on other things great and small that need my attention. This publication is made up of a great many little things, small ideas that flower with their peers and culminate in an essay each week that I usually feel proud of writing. Little things make the lives we live.
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,
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.
This week, I argue that we must have some degree of artifice to organize our thoughts and recognize the things we see in our world.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane—Sources:%5B1%5D For my recent essays referring to this current historiographic project see “On Sources,” Wednesday Blog 6.22, “On Writing,” Ibid., 6.27, and “On Knowledge,” Ibid., 6.29.[2] Lee Alan Dugatkin, Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose, (University of Chicago Press, 2009).[3] Staffan Müller-Wille, “Linnean Lens | Linnaeus’ Lapland Journey Diary (1732),“ moderated by Isabelle Charmantier, virtual lecture, 12 May 2025, by the Linnean Society of London, YouTube, 1:04:18, link here.[4] Jason Roberts, Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life, (Random House, 2024), 45–49.[5] Roberts, 20.[6] Roberts, 115–125.[7] Roberts, 109.[8] André Thevet, Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique, (Antwerp, 1558), 16r–16v. The translation is my own.[9] Roberts, 109.[10] Damião de Góis, Chronica do Felicissimo Rei Dom Emanuel, 4 vols., (Lisbon, 1566–1567).[11] Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, (Cambridge University Press, 2018), 190.[12] Roberts, 110.[13] Michael Wintroub, A Savage Mirror: Power, Identity, and Knowledge in Early Modern France, (Stanford University Press, 2006), 42.[14] Roberts, xii.[15] Roberts, 107.[16] Roberts, 96–98.[17] Michael Allin, Zarafa: A Giraffe’s True Story, from Deep in Africa to the Heart of Paris, (Delta, 1998).
This week, I argue that we must have some degree of artifice to organize our thoughts and recognize the things we see in our world.
Near the end of June on a Sunday afternoon visit to the Barnes & Noble location on the Plaza here in Kansas City when we were picking out books to gift to family, I espied a copy of Jason Roberts’s new paperback Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life. In the Plutarchan model it is a twenty-first century Parallel Lives of Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–1788), two of the eighteenth century’s most prolific naturalists. I saved it as fun reading once I thought I’d done enough of my proper historical work. That moment came after I finished writing the first draft of the new introduction to my dissertation, a rather large addition to my doctoral study which is mostly historiographic in nature.[1] I’ve been reading Roberts’s book in my free time and delighting in the vibrant portraits he paints of the two men in question. I am a newer Fellow of the Linnean Society of London, elected in January 2025, and so I arrived to this particular book with a happy perspective on Linnaeus, whose Systema Naturae is cited in my dissertation as the first identification of the three-toed sloth by the genus Bradypus. At the same time, I’ve referenced Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle far more frequently in those moments when I’m following the legacy threads of my own Renaissance naturalists into the Enlightenment. After all, Buffon cited Thevet on several occasions where the savant referred to the same animals which the earlier cosmographer described two centuries before.
In spite of my own Linnean affiliation, and my use of Buffon’s corpus in the earliest stages of my broader historiography, I am still largely unfamiliar with these two men. I first knew of Buffon for his famous comments on his presumption of the diminutive nature of American animals when compared with their Afro-Eurasian counterparts, to which Thomas Jefferson retorted by sending Buffon evidence of an American moose.[2] I also know very little about Linnaeus, most of what I know of the Swede comes from lectures presented at the Linnean Society online including a recent lecture given in May by Staffan Müller-Wille, Professor in the History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences at Cambridge about Linnaeus’s Lapland diary from his northern expedition in 1732.[3] There is a new biography of Linnaeus by Gunnar Broberg titled The Man Who Organized Nature: The Life of Linnaeuswhich I have an eye on yet haven’t gotten a copy of quite yet. So, reading Roberts’s book is a quick introduction for me to this man who for me is most influential with his method of binominal taxonomy which has appeared time and again here in the Wednesday Blog. Yet this system followed after Linnaeus’s earlier alphabetical system for identifying plants by sexual characteristic. The basic premise here is that if there are 26 letters in the alphabet, we can then use that familiar framework to organize other complicated concepts for easy recognition. Linnaeus used this to categorize plants by their male and female sexual characteristics in his 1730 booklet Praeludia Sponsaliorum Plantarum, or Prelude to the Betrothal of Plants.[4] Therefore, Linnaeus could go around the botanical garden at the University of Uppsala in 1730 and quickly identify a plant as a J plant or a G plant. First reading this I thought of the way that letters are used by the Federal Reserve System to identify specific regional branches. Thus, J represents the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and G the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
I like the idea behind Linnaeus’s alphabetic system yet having only 26 categories to describe the entire plant kingdom seems doomed to be flawed as it relies on a belief that all the plants that are known to exist are the ones that exist, that there’s nothing new under the Sun to be discovered. Roberts frames this in a biblical context, describing how Olof Celsius (1670–1756), one of Linneaus’s first professors, met the young Linnaeus when he was working on a project called the Hierobotanicum or Priestly Plants which was intended to be a compendium of all 126 plants mentioned in the Old and New Testaments.[5] Why would Linnaeus need more than 26 categories to contain all the plants known to the Ancients and to the Bible? Naturally, the flaws were apparent in this from the start by using a system of knowing which originated in the more arid landscape of the Levant rather than in the cooler and damper climate of Sweden. I’ve noticed this in my own life, how many cultural elements which we practice in the United States, notably the seasons, better fit the natural climate of New England and England proper than they do here in the Midwest with its far more variable conditions depending on the time of year, or even the given hour. Roberts deconstructed Linnaeus’s early efforts near the end of Part I of his book when he described Linnaeus’s first scholarly collision with Buffon after the Frenchman’s appointment by Louis XV to the position of Intendant of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris.[6] In a debate which Roberts calls “the Quarrel of the Universals” Linnaeus argued that species could be recognized from individual type specimens while Buffon countered that this ran the great risk of minimizing the diversity of life and eliminating potential variations in nature.
This got me thinking about systems of knowing, thus I decided to render the title of the original file for this blog post that you’re now reading (or listening to) De Systemarum Scientisin the full Latinate tradition of my own scholarship, or “On Systems of Knowing” in English. Why is it, for instance, that our Roman alphabet begins with A and ends with Z? The first half of that question is easier to answer: the Romans adapted our alphabet from the Greeks who started it off with α alpha, β beta, thus the noun alphabet itself. Yet the Greek alphabet ends with ω omega rather than ζ zeta, so why does ours end with Z? What I’ve heard about this is that the Greek letters that were adopted into the Roman alphabet were tacked onto the end of the line, or at least this is what I remember being taught when I learned to recite the alphabet in French in my undergraduate years. French calls the letter Y y-grec, or the Greek i. Likewise, everyone except for we Americans call the final letter of the Roman alphabet some variation of zed, which is a shortening of the Greek zeta. This better reflects that letter’s original sound in Greek, just as the cursive lowercase z is the lowercase Greek ζ just adopted straight into the Roman alphabet without any major changes.
So, when it comes to the organization of our knowledge there are things that we know in this same alphabetical order or in relation to this alphabetical order. Because the Roman alphabet is written left to right, we know that when it’s used to set up a coordinate system on a printed map that A will always appear to the top left, orientating the way the map should be held. Likewise, a reader can quickly scan through an index in any language written in the Roman alphabet by following along with the order of the letters. How individual languages index objects from that point on differs, but the foundational element remains the same. The Roman alphabet works best for Latin, the language for which it was originally developed, so it tends to be adapted in its phonetic values depending on which language is using it. This is why English uses the letter W to represent a [w] sound while German and in loanwords French uses W to represent a [ˈv] sound. Meanwhile, Irish represents the [w] and [ˈv] sounds with two digraphs, bh and mh that represent both depending on the context. Typically, bh represents [ˈv] while mh represents [w], but it depends on context. The reasoning behind this is that when the Roman alphabet was adapted by Latin speakers to fit Old Irish in the fifth and sixth centuries CE they approximated the phonology of their Latin in rendering the Roman alphabet usable for Irish. So, to these monks the Irish [ˈv] sound in a Gaelic name like Medbh sounded enough like how the letter b was used at the time that they used that letter to approximate this [ˈv] sound. It’s notable to me that in Modern Greek the letter βis today pronounced veta and in the Cyrillic alphabet the letter В represents this same [ˈv] sound while the letter Б represents the [b] sound that we English-speakers associate with the letter B. Cyrillic and its predecessor the Slavonic alphabet were being developed around the same time that the Roman alphabet began to be used for Irish so there must’ve been something going on with the pronunciation of people’s Bs becoming closer to Vs in late antiquity. Thus, the ways in which our alphabets represent specific sounds today reflect the prestige dialects of our two classical languages–Latin and Greek–as they were spoken over a millennium ago.
Consider then how we distinguish technical, scientific, or artistic terminology depending on the prestige language of that field. History has largely become a vernacular field, where we adapt terms that will be more familiar to the non-professional enough to initiate them into what Ada Palmer calls the History Lab. Yet often these terms will have etymologies beyond English itself. Consider the word photograph, or its more common shortened form photo. This word comes purely from Greek, the classical language more associated with science and technology. It blends the Greek φωτο-, the blending form of φῶς (phôs), or light with the suffix –γρᾰ́φος, from the verb γρᾰ́φω meaning to draw, sketch, or write. So, photography at its core is light writing. Neat! The word photography entered English from the French photographie, that etymology referring to the French origins of the art and craft of photography itself in the middle of the 1820s. Yet the linguists who modernized Irish a century ago decided to favor indigenous terminologies, rendering this word grianghraf using the Irish word grian for Sun instead of a variation of φωτο- (light) while adopting the Greek –γρᾰ́φος suffix to center this new Irish conception of the term within the same technological corpus as the English photograph. While consequential to have a particular Irish name for this technology that elevated the Irish use of photography as equal to any other culture’s photography and particular within the Irish language, it still remains rooted in the same western tradition of grounding our names for scientific and technical things in Greek.
Language directly influences how we know things because it is the vehicle by which we recognize those things around us. I know that a photograph is something made by “light writing” therefore I will also recognize that anything else beginning with “photo” also refers to “light” and that anything ending with “graph” refers to some form of record or writing. I come from a culture where light is connected with goodness and dark with ill. Likewise, for me I think of blue and green as happier colors rather than red or orange which are angrier colors. There is safety in light, in the daytime we can see people or things coming toward us easier than in the dark of night. At the Easter Vigil the celebrant lights the Paschal Flame which is then passed around the church so that we all share in the Light of Christ (Lux Christi) returned to the world with the Resurrection. The central question in my dissertation is linguistic: what did André Thevet (1516–1590) mean when he referred to the Americas overall as sauvage? This French word translates into English as both savage and wild, yet I chose to retain the original French to better represent the original concept which encompasses both concepts in English. This word was not necessarily racial in the modern sense, rather Thevet used sauvage to describe people, places, and things which existed beyond civilization. This word itself betrays its original meaning, that is city life. Thevet himself understood the sauvage to be the antonym of this city life. I describe it in the introduction to my dissertation in terms of light and dark, following the cultural connotations already illuminated: the city is the sun whence radiates the light of civilization. The further one goes from that sun, the darker things become and the less civilized they remain. Thevet’s sauvage existed at that furthest extreme in the dark. I imagine the character of Gollum in this sort of darkened existence, deep beneath the Misty Mountains uninterested in light save for the Ring of Power which consumed his day rendering it eternal night. In the literature of Thevet’s time a fine sauvage characterization is Caliban in Shakespeare’s Tempest, wild as the waters which wrecked King Alonso and his men on the island in Act 1 of that play.
Roberts notes how these linguistic attributes influenced Linnaeus’s systemization of humanity in the 1735 second edition of his Systema Naturae. The Swede divided humanity into four subcategories described by color over any other facet.[7] Roberts spends the following five pages questioning Linnaeus’s methodology, asking “why four?” and why these specific colors? There is some historical context for Linnaeus’s choice to refer to Black Africans, even Thevet referred to the varied peoples of Africa as “black” in his Singularitez de la France Antarctique. Thevet hints at a possible environmental cause for blackness, writing that the peoples “of Barbary” who are “the blackest” are “of the same manners and conditions as their region is hotter than others.”[8] Thevet’s understanding of African geography is somewhat uncertain, so his definition of Barbary may not align with the Berbers from whom the Barbary Coast of the Maghreb was named. Still, it hints at an understanding that the hotter, or more torrid, the climate got the darker the skin of the people would become. Roberts notes that the Portuguese were the first to use the “word negro to signify African origin or descent” in the middle of the sixteenth century.[9] This makes sense considering the Portuguese were the first European power to sail down the West African coast in the fifteenth century. That Roberts notes this Portuguese definition of blackness first appears in the middle of the sixteenth century likely refers to Damião de Góis’s (1502–1574) Chronica do Dom Emmanuel I of 1566 to 1567 which is an early source that I’ve consulted for information on the voyages of Vasco da Gama (d. 1524).[10] Geraldine Heng, the leading authority on medieval notions of race, wrote in her 2018 book The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages that blackness was already well established as an element in religious and secular iconography by the beginning of the First Age of Exploration.[11] Roberts concludes his discussion of this particular racial element of Linnaeus’s great contribution to taxonomy sullenly noting that it’s thanks to Linnaeus that this cultural connotation of blackness with darkness was given scientific credence which continues to support racist ideologies to this day.[12]
How do we use our own words to describe things to which they are not suited, in turn transforming the nature of those things that they may become part of our own world? My research is most interested in understanding these questions of how those things at the boundaries of knowledge were understood by André Thevet using the tools afforded to him during the French Renaissance of the sixteenth century. Thevet used the word sauvage to do this and create a category of life against which he could measure and proclaim the existence of something civilized closer to home. Michael Wintroub, Professor Emeritus of Rhetoric at Cal-Berkeley, wrote in his 2006 book A Savage Mirror that Thevet’s countrymen sought to “civilize the barbarians” to make up for an insecurity they felt at being called barbarians themselves by Italian intellectuals at the turn of the sixteenth century during the French invasion of Italy under King Charles VIII (r. 1483–1498).[13] As long as there was someone else who the French could look down upon beyond their own cities they felt secure in their own civility. Yet the sauvage exists within a larger framework of singularities, a word which is central to Thevet’s cosmography. Thevet used the word singularity to describe those things which were exotic, wonderous, and immensely collectable in his eye and hopefully in the eyes of potential readers who would buy his books. I see various layers and categories of singularities in Thevet’s cosmography, for instance he only included images of certain animals in his book of the same name, the aforementioned Singularitez of 1557. The sloth and toucan were depicted as well as described, yet the mysterious Ascension Island aponar remained a bird worthy only of a textual description. This suggests that somethings were more singular than others, or more worthy of attention and the money needed to produce these woodcut images than others. These systems of knowing framed around the singularity are the subject about which I intend to write my first academic monograph. Classifying something as singular gives it an appeal which sets it aside from both the civil and the sauvage as belonging to a higher level of category which can include both the urbane and the agrestic.
Jason Roberts describes Buffon and Linnaeus’s mutual missions to make something of themselves and to rise above their provincial origins to the heights of society. I laughed out loud reading Roberts’s introduction to Linnaeus’s character, what felt like an iconoclasm of sorts for this Fellow of the Linnean Society. “Carl Linnaeus was a Swedish doctor with a diploma-mill medical degree and a flair for self-promotion, who trumpeted that ‘nobody has been a greater botanist or zoologist’ while anonymously publishing rave reviews of his own work.”[14] Buffon by contrast took advantage of a golden opportunity to build his own demi-paradise at his manor in the Burgundy countryside until his good reputation as a botanist brought him to royal attention and the appointment as Intendent of Jardin du Roi.[15] The Jardin des Plantes, as Buffon’s charge is today known, is perhaps a better place to conclude than most. Situated in the Fifth Arrondissement across Boulevard de l’Hôpital and Rue Buffon from Gare d’Austerlitz, the Jardin is an urban oasis created for the purpose of crafting systems of knowing. Its original intent was to serve as a medicinal garden existing beyond the purview of the Sorbonne, Paris’s sole licensed teaching medical school in the seventeenth century.[16] I’ve spent several happy hours wandering through the Jardin, home to the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle’s Grande Galerie de l’Évolution, the Galerie de Paléontologie et d’Anatomie compare, and the Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes, which was home to Paris’s first resident giraffe whose story is delightfully told by Michael Allin in his 1998 book Zarafa: A Giraffe’s True Story, from Deep in Africa to the Heart of Paris.[17] While Allin’s heroine Zarafa is not today on display in the Grande Galerie de l’Évolution (she is instead today to be found in the Muséum d’Histoire naturelle de La Rochelle), the taxidermy in the Parade of African Mammals that is the centerpiece of the Grande Galerie represents a system of knowing animal life in itself.An elephant leads the parade followed by hippopotami, zebras, and giraffes with two such camelopards standing erect their long necks rising toward the upper galleries at the center of the procession. Behind them come the horned mammals, rhinoceroses, and at the rear a crouching lion watching its prey. This is a system that Buffon would have appreciated more than Linnaeus, one which represents the nature of individual beings more than species. Each stuffed specimen seems to have its own character, its own personality. They look about as one would expect they would in life. The great artifice of this is the idea of a parade itself, a very human notion indeed, and one that is infrequent enough to be nearly singular in character, a reason for a day out, worth putting in the social calendar of a city, town, or village no matter how large or small. A parade is its own system of knowing.
[1] For my recent essays referring to this current historiographic project see “On Sources,” Wednesday Blog 6.22, “On Writing,” Ibid., 6.27, and “On Knowledge,” Ibid., 6.29.
[3] Staffan Müller-Wille, “Linnean Lens | Linnaeus’ Lapland Journey Diary (1732),“ moderated by Isabelle Charmantier, virtual lecture, 12 May 2025, by the Linnean Society of London, YouTube, 1:04:18, link here.
This week, the coalescence of my thoughts over the last few months about how the way we communicate today in 2025 is so rooted in our technology.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
This week, the coalescence of my thoughts over the last few months about how the way we communicate today in 2025 is so rooted in our technology.
For most of my life I tended to write a lot of ordinary quotidian things out by hand on paper either in notebooks, on notepads, or on the backs of receipts, envelopes, or whatever paper I had around. I kept up a good cursive hand and used it on a regular basis. Yet in the last decade technology has caught up to the humble notepad; a decade ago when I was living in London and trying to write out ideas for my first round of graduate essays on my phone’s Notes app while I was on the train or walking about, I often found that app in particular drained my phone’s battery at a considerable and worrisome rate. Then again, that particular smartphone tended to die if the battery dropped below 40 percent, so it had a bad battery. Still, that led to me continuing with the practice of keeping notes and scribblings in little notebooks or on notepads that I carried with me in a pocket.
It’s funny then that it’s only now in 2025 that I notice how little I write these same notes anymore by hand; in 2021 when my Mom came to visit me in Binghamton, she brought me a couple of notebooks emblazoned with pictures of various national parks on their covers, a new trend in notebooks that began around then. I was a little taken aback by this gift because by that point I’d largely done away with handwritten notes all together. In fact, my Binghamton years launched me head-first into doing as much as possible on the computer so that I’d have less paper and books to carry back and forth between Upstate New York and Kansas City. Like printed books over digital ones, when I returned to Kansas City I began to write handwritten notes again. This is largely thanks to my employers at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts; in our department we still carry around paper performance notes on our shifts. When I started, I was surprised to realize that at some point in the last 5 years I’d stopped carrying a pen with me on a daily basis. Since then, in April 2023, I’ve always had a pen in my pocket.
The pandemic reinforced our digital communications in ways which pushed us firmly forward toward more frequent videocalls and texting to the detriment of the telephone in particular. Most of my friends and family tend to prefer text messages over phone calls, especially among my fellow millennials, to the point that I often second-guess myself as to whether I should try calling someone in the first place. Is a phone call intrusive, whereas a text message is like a telegram or a letter? It can be replied to in the recipient’s own time, though with a text the response time is usually expected to be faster than with a letter that’ll take days to arrive, or even an email, which I see as slightly more formal. Since the invention of Samuel Morse’s electrical telegraph in 1838, our communications have moved into a realm of electricity which was foreign to our conversations and our lives beyond lightning strikes and the daily shocks one gets in a dry climate.
This Spring then, when I was regularly on videocalls–usually over Zoom–with friends, colleagues, and family alike a thought occurred to me that all of our communications are being translated down to electrical signals being sent over wires from one person’s device to another. Those messages, no matter the content, all buzz and fizzle through our wireless data signals and across our telephone wires, through our data centers and bouncing off our satellites all to better communicate to anyone whether on the planet or high above us in orbit or beyond. It’s made us all so much closer to one another. Today, I’m regularly in contact with people in North America, Europe, and Asia and that contact is often almost as instantaneous as if we were together in the same room. It’s what makes my solitary life feel lived in community with the people I like. And yet it’s also spoiled us for the slower communication of the written letter or even the face-to-face conversation that started all these “words, words, words” as Hamlet says that we “might unpack my heart with words.” We communicate to do just that: to speak our thoughts and to live in the strange and beautiful worlds we build around ourselves. So often now, those conversations are not only occurring with the aid of the electrical signals pulsing about our minds telling us how to react and what to say and do, but also through their extracorporeal currents which connect us through our technology across vast distances to one another.
You are listening to my voice filtered by the microphone and my audio editing software being transmitted to anyone with an internet connection. While naturally we aren’t supposed to hear it, as my hearing isn’t quite as good as it should be, I can now hear the differences between sound frequencies in a finer detail yet to the point that if two voices are speaking with the same frequency, I only hear ringing at that frequency and no words or other noise. This was demonstrated to me with dramatic and terrifying effect several years ago when I was nearly t-boned by a Kansas City fire engine roaring along at full speed because I didn’t hear its siren, which wails at the same frequency as the particular section of the 1st movement of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto that I was listening to in my car at the time. So, when you hear my voice what you’re hearing is an electronic recording of my voice being transmitted to you. Often, I sound higher pitched on the recording even by just a half-step, than I do to my ears when I’m doing the recording. I’m a tenor, so I’m okay with that. Still, it’s noticeable especially if I record later in the day or at night, or if I’m nervous.
After I began my graduate studies in History back in August 2017, I started making a practice of recording any conference presentation or invited lecture I gave. I’d usually only make a sound recording, not wanting to deal with a camera. This way too, if someone missed a talk and wanted to see it, I could lay the slides over the recording in iMovie and turn it into a video to send around. This has turned into a wonderful tool for listening to changes in my voice over the years. Yet it’s also interesting now because I not only use this tool for recording the actual performance but also the rehearsals as well, and sometimes when I’m editing papers. I gave a lightning talk last week that was part of a webinar hosted by the Graduate Student Advisory Committee of the Renaissance Society of America about animal intelligence titled “Animals Adapting to Changes in Nature: Perceptions of Animal Intelligence in the Renaissance?” The paper itself was pretty quick and easy to write; it maybe took me an hour to make the first draft several months ago. Yet I began recording rehearsals and making edits after each one up to the minutes before I went live on Thursday morning. I was a bit nervous when I presented, so in the end the cool and practiced pace I’d planned with a mid-range voice ended up being a minute faster than expected and closer to my upper register. When I’ve thought about what to do if anyone asked to hear this talk after the fact, I’ve considered possibly sending out my last rehearsal recording from an hour before the performance, after all many speakers would in decades past make a separate recording of their lectures & speeches from the actual live reading. Yet to keep it authentic to the talk as it went ahead, I also feel inclined to send out the one that I gave on Thursday morning to the 16 other panelists and organizers on the call and the 35 attendees listening in from around the globe. This question gets to the heart of my talk because I made the case that André Thevet’s sloth showed signs of intelligence by refusing food it didn’t want to eat and not falling to the same bad practices as the Frenchmen who captured it or the native Tupinambá who were more familiar with it. Those practices, human faults one might say, include indecision.
Rather than flip a coin or pick another method of choosing, I’m instead going to play for you now the last rehearsal recording for one very simple reason. The main benefit of my recording of the actual talk is that it ought to have captured the organizer’s introduction and the questions that followed my presentation. Yet, my phone’s microphone couldn’t pick any of that up because my computer’s sound output was going into my headphones. So, without any more gilding the lily here are my thoughts on Renaissance sloths adapting to changes in nature, brought to you through a most electronic form of communication.
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Animals Adapting to Changes in Nature:
Perceptions of Animal Intelligence in the Renaissance?
I want to begin by thanking the members of the RSA Graduate Student Advisory Committee for holding these lightning talks and accepting my proposal among the speakers today. When considering this question of animal intelligence, I’m drawn back to the Aristotelian notions of the animal sensitive soul in contrast to the human rational soul; Erica Fudge put it well, writing that animals can feel, perceive, and move, yet humans are the only natural beings to express intellect.[1] Animals were used as stand-ins for humans in allegory and vivisection, and an over-exertion of passion could drive a human into a state of animality, yet the human was understood to be fundamentally different because of our facilities of reason developed through experience over one’s lifetime.[2]
Newly encountered American animals played a disruptive role in this dynamic. Anatomically, many such animals defied European expectations for their size, or their chimerical character appearing as a composite of unrelated creatures known to exist in the wider Mediterranean World. Chief among these in my research is the three-toed sloth which was described by the French cosmographer André Thevet (1516–1590) in his 1557 book Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique. There are many different aspects of Thevet’s sloth which allowed it to stand out as a singularity among singularities from its appearance as a bear-like ape to its vocalizations “sighing like a little child afflicted with sorrow” to its general disregard by the indigenous Tupinambá people who explained aspects of its manner to Thevet.[3] I’ve written and spoken extensively about this, I know several of you have heard me talk about Thevet’s sloth at a number of conferences in the last several years. Today though, I want to discuss something I haven’t addressed yet in all these presentations; namely the signs in Thevet’s text which point toward some sense of the sloth’s intelligence.
The sloth’s intelligence is seen in its abstention from eating the food Thevet provided it. Thevet wrote “I kept it well for a space of 26 days, where I knew that it never ate or drank, but was always in a similar state.”[4] This reaffirmed Thevet’s assertion that “this beast has never been seen to eat by a living human,” either by the Tupinambá or the French.[5] This abstention from eating could well be understood as a sign of the sloth’s lack of a rational soul which would know to eat; yet I think it is better to perceive the sloth’s abstinence as an active choice made by an animal who didn’t favor the food it was offered. Thevet wrote that “some believe that this beast lives solely on leaves of a tree named in [the Tupi language] Amahut,” which is one of the Cercopia species known to live along the Brazilian coast.[6] Yet a 2021 sloth behavioral study published in the journal Austral Ecology has proven that this claim is less grounded in the genus’s actual experience.[7]
Perhaps the sloth can be best contrasted with the dogs which killed it at the end of that 26-day captivity, or even with the accused descent from humanity by first the Tupinambá and later the French in accusations of cannibalism. Unlike the humans who occupy these stories from France Antarctique who so often fall so far from their rationality to eat each other, the sloth simply refused to eat at all. This small creature, taken from its forest home and left in the care of an unfamiliar human who didn’t know what to feed it, chose to preserve its nature and not eat what was foreign to it. The sloth adapted to changes in the nature around it and expressed an intelligence perhaps more elevated than the humans who captured it. I’m drawn to one of the most poignant lines in Montaigne’s essay “Des cannibales” in which the erstwhile political animal himself wrote “I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead; and in tearing by tortures and the rack a body still full of feeling.”[8] In all of the variations on his sloth account, Thevet published this same story twice first in the Singularitez of 1557 and later in the Cosmographie Universelle of 1575, the dominant sense I get from Thevet’s text is one of befuddlement at an animal that defied his expectations in so many ways. In the tradition of animal allegories from Aesop to Renyard the Fox the sloth fills the role of an exotic oddity, a stranger in the canon of European natural history which didn’t quite fit any mold available. Even after Thevet’s sloth was christened by Conrad Gessner an Arctopithecus in 1560 and by Carolus Clusius as an Ignavus in 1605, this fact that it refused to eat or drink what Thevet offered it for 26 days remained a constant in its story. I see in the sloth a sign of intelligence beyond expected human norms and rules which rendered it exceptional. Any assimilation of the sloth was an artifice laid over its character, a colonial imposition. Still, its abstinence fit the framework of the sensitive soul, reflecting a delicate sensitivity toward things it found unfamiliar.
~
How does a 450 year old sloth’s intelligence have any bearing on the electronic signals which carry our communications in this new century? I wouldn’t have been able to study Thevet’s sloth in the way I have without the internet and all our technology. So much of my work is with digitized primary sources, mostly printed books, that I do almost all of my research on the computer. It’s a rare occurrence that I get to go into an archive to look at a source in the flesh. Yet I think there’s another interpretation we can take here: like the sloth we choose how much we are in touch with each other, how much of our lives are spent with our phones in our hands. My weekly screen-time report tends to fall in the 3 hour range per day. Yet I’m not only checking my social media accounts or texting with people on my phone, but I’m also reading books and writing notes and ideas down on my phone or using the camera to try and capture an artful reflection of the lived world around me. Recently on Instagram I saw another person’s screen-time report say they spend 14 hours on their phone per day, which is essentially the entirety of my waking hours. To me that is unhealthy to an extreme. Yet that’s how that individual has chosen to live their life.
I know that no matter where I end up, I will remain connected to others through our technology. Somedays I do miss the slower pace of sending letters or calling family and friends on the phone as things were when I was a child. I’d rather talk with someone face-to-face or voice-to-voice than text. As I wrote in January, I feel that we’ve allowed texting to take the place that videocalls were supposed to hold in the 21st century. We’re not constantly talking to people over monitors beyond Zoom calls that are scheduled and with that pre-arrangement more formal than the quotidian string of text messages. Today, I do have a notepad on my desk, one that was given to me among the materials of a workshop I attended at the École des Hautes-Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris last summer. It’s gotten some use, yet one year later I’m still only halfway through the gridded pages. As with so much of life in general, I feel that I’m trying to find a balance between the digital and the manual, between life online and life in this place where I find myself in a given moment. All I know for certain is that over all else, I long for connection.
[7] Gastón Andrés Fernandez Giné, Gastón Andrés, Laila Santim Mureb, and Camila Righetto Cassano, “Feeding ecology of the maned sloth (Bradypus torquatus): Understanding diet composition and preferences, and prospects for future studies,” Austral Ecology47 (2022): pp. 1124–1135, at p. 1132.
[8] Michel de Montaigne, “Of Cannibals,” in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame, (Stanford University Press, 1965),155.
This week, the third in several scribblings about my research: how studying Thevet and his world fulfills a need to find purpose in life.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
This week, the third in several scribblings about my research: how studying Thevet and his world fulfills a need to find purpose in life.
Throughout my graduate education the need for new work to compliment, correct, or add to old work has remained a constant theme. It’s critical to our profession, otherwise why devote our time and talent to studying the past if we’re merely rehashing something already said in the generations of our profession’s own history? I passed through the first five of years of my graduate education without that purpose or that drive, and I think it’s what kept me behind some of my colleagues in achievement. Yet when I found something to make my own, a historical topic upon which to pitch my tent and make myself known, I took that chance. Still, I wasn’t entirely sure what value studying Thevet actually brought to the profession. He is an important figure of middling influence in the development of Renaissance natural history, one whose contributions have often been reduced to laughable exemplars of a time before the scientific study of zoology developed. A secondary approach I take to Thevet is to view his work in light of the great contributions to natural history of the great minds of the Enlightenment, active two centuries after the cosmographer, who are often the next great mile marker in the long road that is the history of natural history.
Of these Enlightenment naturalists, the Comte de Buffon (1701–1788) acknowledged the better parts of what Thevet wrote and adopted those as mile markers in his own natural histories. I think Thevet often appears in the eighteenth century because the center of European thought had shifted by that time from Italy, the radiant heart of Renaissance humanism, to France and so the likes of Buffon and Humboldt would’ve been familiar with Thevet as he was one of the more prominent French naturalists whose books were available. Thevet’s notoriety in his own century lay predominately in the transalpine republic of letters, most famously with his Zurich-based admirer Conrad Gessner (1516–1565) who was personally responsible for elevating Thevet’s natural history beyond the original editions to a broader consciousness by including Thevet’s animals in his own Icones animalium and Icones avium omnium of 1560 and his German Thierbuch of 1562. While Thevet’s Singularitez was translated into Italian by the Venetian Giuseppe Horologgi in an edition published by the eminent Venetian printer Gabriele Giolito de’ Ferrari (1508–1578) with the title Historia dell’India America detta altramente Francia Antartica, that volume didn’t carry over the woodcuts which Thevet included in the first edition published in Paris by Maurice de la Porte in 1557 that were copied for Christophe Plantin’s 1558 edition published in Antwerp. This says to me that these pictures didn’t fit the purpose of Giolito’s edition; they especially didn’t fit the sorts of books he anticipated selling Thevet’s alongside. As such, without the pictures Thevet’s work doesn’t seem to have carried as much weight in Italy and is instead better remembered in its original French.
When I was first searching for copies of the Singularitez in August 2019, I initially downloaded a copy of the 1878 Paul Gaffarel edition of the book, which while of great utility especially in its footnotes, isn’t as important as any of the original 1557 or 1558 editions published in Paris and Antwerp to my research. These are the core sources for my work; in particular I used a copy of the 1558 Plantin edition published in Antwerp as my main source for my translation. I can make the case that the Plantin edition is more important in the context of Thevet’s natural history, as it’s the same edition that Gessner acquired and used as the basis for his inclusion of the sloth and toucan in his 1560 pair of Icones books, however in all truth I ended up working with that edition because it was the first one that I found from the sixteenth century. Unlike the two Paris editions (1557 & 1558), Plantin’s edition was not intended for a domestic French audience. The most recent effort of mine toward the publication of my translation was to translate the different royal and imperial privileges and letters to patrons of each translator in order to fully place my own translation within the varied contexts in which each of these contemporary editions existed. It’s interesting to see Thomas Hacket’s 1568 English translation be dedicated to Sir Henry Sidney, who was a major player in the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland and in the early English colonial enterprise. In contrast, Horologgi’s translation begins with a letter to his patron, Paolo Giordano I Orsini (1541–1585), the Duke of Bracciano and like Sidney a noted military man. Thevet himself dedicated his book to Jean de Bertrand, Cardinal of Sens (r. 1557–1560), and in doing dedicated it to the French national cause within which one can best understand the whole French expedition in Brazil.Thevet sought a sense of purpose in his life built upon the travel books he loved to read. He made himself a character in those books, a cosmographer who could be trusted to tell the truth of the faraway because he had seen it with his own eyes. The logic of this always made good sense to me, after all the authority of the historian lies in our expertise and familiarity with our sources. In my case, I’ve found a sense of purpose in my life built upon the travel books I loved to read, and I’ve built my career on my expertise in Thevet’s works. We need to have a sense of purpose in what we do to find life rewarding. I’ve done jobs that’ve been for the money and sure they’ve kept the lights on, but they haven’t been nearly as fulfilling as my research and teaching, which I love doing. The people I’ve met in academia are among my favorite anywhere, fellow experts with whom I can discuss historical topics with a sense of mutual respect and admiration. That’s what I want in my life more than anything else, that community that comes from our profession and a sense of purpose in what we do.
This week, the second in several scribblings about my research: why I chose to study André Thevet and build my career on the mound of his works.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
This week, the second in several scribblings about my research: why I chose to study André Thevet and build my career on the mound of his works.
I initially chose to focus my dissertation on André Thevet (1516–1590) because of his account of the sloth and because he was French; I speak the language and therefore felt I would not need to learn another language to grasp the sources. Thevet is a figure who I’ve gotten to know over the last 6 years. I first encountered him in Dr. Bill Ashworth’s Renaissance seminar at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. It was in a nice classroom in the southeast corner of the third floor of Haag Hall that welcomed in the midday light as the Sun arced across the sky. We met on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and often I would walk to class from my job working at a cheese shop, the Better Cheddar, at 49th & Pennsylvania on the Plaza. What I didn’t admit at the time but have freely regaled friends and family since is that on Tuesdays the shop’s sommelier would often stop by to offer those of us working at the time wine tastings of the latest vintages. I was hired by the cheesemongers there more for my knowledge of European wines, and because I spoke French, than for my far more limited understanding of cheese going into the job. So, I often went from a delightful morning tasting cabernet francs, pinot noirs, and syrahs to a delightful afternoon sitting in the back third of Dr. Ashworth’s class listening to his stories about the Renaissance.
By this point, I was still committed to a largely unfounded master’s thesis project studying crypto-Catholics in the English court of James I and VI, which was born out of a desire that I might find my way back to London perhaps to work as a curator at the Banqueting House or Hampton Court. By Christmas, that project had well and truly died, it was only several years later that I discovered the fantastic work of the late Professor John Bossey on persistent Catholicism in the North of England that I found the anchor and line that would’ve led me toward my original research project idea. As it turned out, I found my way to Thevet through a more traditional Renaissance history master’s thesis about English humanism, specifically the education of Margaret Roper (1505–1544) and Mary Basset (c. 1523–1572), daughter and granddaughter of St. Thomas More (1478–1535). As an English-speaking Catholic of mostly Irish descent, with a fair minority of English ancestors to boot, I was drawn to the More family as models of a Catholic conscience; it is rather fitting that the upsurge of English colonialism in Ireland coincided with the English Reformation. When I lived in London, while I usually attended Mass at the Jesuit church at Farm Street in Mayfair, I would occasionally go to the English Chant Mass at Westminster Cathedral near Victoria Station. All of this came together in my History master’s thesis about Roper and Basset, my second thesis after the one I wrote in London for my degree in International Relations and Democratic Politics at the University of Westminster.
A painting miniature of the family of Sir Thomas More held in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, c. 1527. Photo by the author.
Yet while I was working on this and writing good essays and papers, I kept hearing my friends talk about how the classes they loved the most dealt with the History of Science. One of my greatest regrets from my time at UMKC is that I didn’t take Dr. Ashworth’s Scientific Revolution class. It would’ve proved to be a good foundation considering I’ve taught essentially the same material since, and considering a great deal of the effort of my generation has been focused on deconstructing this perception of a revolution from humanism to science at the turn of the seventeenth century. So, when I discovered to my horror two weeks before leaving Kansas City to begin my doctorate at Binghamton that the thesis of the dissertation I intended to write had been published in a peer-reviewed journal a year before I took the chance to shift gears entirely and dive into the history of science. I used Thevet’s sloth as my diving board.
I met André Thevet in August 2019. We’d been introduced three years before by Bill Ashworth, yet besides the chuckles I gave at seeing his sloth engraving for the first time I turned my mind away from the Franciscan. Through Thevet I was introduced to the Renaissance notion of cosmography, a starkly different use of the term than how I’d heard it. To me, cosmos is most synonymous with Carl Sagan’s book and documentary series, including that series’ remake in the last decade by Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Sagan’s widow Ann Druyan. I kept coming across the word cosmos throughout the years I was in Binghamton in a myriad of windows. On all of my long drives I listened to audiobooks, and I usually remember the books better than the drives themselves. They animated my existence for those days in the Mazda Rua, my car, crossing the eastern half of our country by road. The first day of my August 2021 Long Drive East was so animated first by Alex Trebek’s last book, which he and Ken Jennings co-narrated, and second after I finished that book on I-70 near the Indiana-Ohio border I turned on a reading of Sagan’s Cosmos read by LeVar Burton. I stopped the car at the Ohio Welcome Center, maybe an hour into the book, to try and get another stand hour on my smart watch and was struck at how brilliant the sky above me seemed that clear August night. That day I’d been running from a massive storm that bore down on Iowa, Illinois, and northern Indiana, a derecho, and for the first time all day I couldn’t see the dark billowing clouds with bolts of lightning shooting forth like thanatic trumpets reminding all in their path that we are mere lodgers on this continent owned by Nature itself. Yet in that moment there were no clouds, no storms on the horizon, only stars burning high above.
Myself in the captain’s chair at the Star Trek Tour in Ticonderoga, NY. Photo: Alex Brisson.
In another drive on a Sunday in late September 2022, at the end of a delightful weekend I spent with my friend Alex Brisson in Ticonderoga and Albany, I drove southwest through the rolling hills of Central New York toward Cooperstown to visit the Hall of Fame. While I was driving, I listened to Andrea Wulf’s biography of the Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). On that particular Sunday, I listened as Humboldt’s own book Kosmos was described in depth. It felt to me that I could see some of the inspiration for Sagan’s Cosmos in Humboldt’s magnum opus, and I was left wondering how Thevet’s own Renaissance cosmography fit into this cosmic lineage. As it turns out, Humboldt was familiar with Thevet’s work, and didn’t care for it at all. The Prussian naturalist is one of the earliest figures in my dissertation’s secondary literature, and he is important because he largely dismissed Thevet’s contributions to natural history writing that his vision of the cosmos was too small to warrant that word.[1] In many ways, my approach to Thevet has always been bi-directional: I’ve tried to learn more about the man by finding the books which survive from his library and the books we know he translated while at the same time I’ve always had an eye on Thevet as a starting point for understanding a specifically non-Iberian understanding of the development of the natural history of the Americas beginning in the Renaissance. My own perceptions of natural history are shaped by my childhood introduction to this vast kaleidoscope of the human vision of the rest of nature on display in my hometown natural history museum, the encyclopedic Field Museum on the Chicago lakefront. While as a child I marveled more at the dinosaurs in their upper floor galleries, now as an adult I prefer to spend my time in the museum among the taxidermy and dioramas with one eye drawn to nostalgic escape and the other toward scholarship; the Field Museum contains a specimen of one likely candidate for the species of three-toed sloth that Thevet described in his Singularitez. By taking this multidirectional focus on the history of natural history, on the one side starting with Thevet in the sixteenth century and on the other with Carl Akeley and the collecting expeditions launched by the Field Museum at the turn of the last century, I’ve developed a particular perspective on natural history that is visible in both wide and narrow focuses.
Fighting African Elephants in Stanley Field Hall. Taxidermy by Carl Akeley . 41411 is on the left with two tusks and its trunk is raised. 41410 is on the right, with one tusk. Photo credit: (c) Field Museum of Natural History – CC BY-NC 4.0.
A portrait of André Thevet from 1554
In the six years since, I felt that I not only got to know André Thevet the cosmographer but something of Thevet the man. He was just a few years older than I am when he made his first overseas voyage from France to Constantinople, the Levant, and Egypt in 1551. The most famous portraits of Thevet were published in his 1575 Cosmographie Universelle and 1584 Vrais Pourtraits des Hommes Illustres. These two portraits show Thevet at the height of his career, the cosmographer royal, the keeper of an expansive cabinet of curiosities, and a close confident of the Valois royals. Yet there’s an older portrait of Thevet as a younger man which appears in his first book, the Cosmographie de Levant, published in 1554. In it, Thevet is shown not as the resolute man of his craft but as a humble Franciscan friar. It was a position that he was put in by his father when he was 10 years old in order to give the boy a chance at a good education. I see in these three portraits something of a desire for better and greater things. In the process he crossed some people the wrong way and got a fair few things wrong in his cosmography. I’ve learned to take what Thevet wrote with a fine grain of salt especially later in his life. I wonder though if some of the acrimony that Thevet’s reputation has faced since his death in 1590 isn’t in part because of his close ties to the Valois family who declined from power and were replaced by their Bourbon cousins the year before and largely by the Valois’ infamy in the history of the French Wars of Religion, in which the Huguenots who traveled to Brazil with Thevet in 1555 were so threatened by their country over matters of faith. I recently met a woman at a Kansas City Symphony performance who was wearing a Huguenot cross necklace, and it struck me how her ancestors’ experience living as Protestants in a Catholic state mirrored my own ancestors’ experiences living as Catholics in Ireland during the Protestant Ascendancy and Act of Union with the very Protestant Kingdom of Great Britain in 1800. Like her, I’d grown up with a sense of pride in my Catholic ancestors’ resilience at staying Catholic in spite of the state which ruled over them. Seeing the long shadow of the Wars of Religion which for my people didn’t really end until Good Friday 1998 from this vantage gave me tremendous perspective. How did Thevet view it all? He blamed the Huguenots in part for the fall of France Antarctique in his Cosmographie Universelle, writing that “little of this would have happened without some sedition among the French, which began with the division and parting of four ministers of the new religion sent by Calvin to plant his bloody gospel.”[2] Why did he choose to write that the way he did? Certainly, these religious tensions gave cause for the Portuguese to eliminate the French presence in Brazil, yet wouldn’t the economic threat of the French presence in Brazil toward Portuguese trade be justification enough? Could Thevet have been responding to the political situation he found himself in when he published the Cosmographie Universelle in Paris in 1575?
Thevet in 1584.
I like Thevet because I find the man relatable, I get the sense that we can relate somewhat; like him I’ve felt this constant need to prove myself to my peers. This need has waned somewhat as I’m moving along with my career. Yet I feel the younger Thevet depicted in his Cosmographie de Levant is more relatable to my life today in my early thirties. While not a cleric, I chose to not go down that path, I’m alone in my life with a strong sense of wanderlust. Those wanderings have taken me to Paris twice now in the last two years to get a sense of Thevet from beyond the printed books with which I’m most familiar. In October 2023 I followed a lead which took me to Rue de Bièvre, the street where he lived at the end of his life up to his death in 1590. I walked up and down that little street between Boulevard Saint-Germain and Quai de la Tournelle and stopped in the pocket park on the western side of that street. I felt that this was the closest I’d ever get to him, after all the church where he was buried, the Convent des Cordeliers, was desecrated during the Revolution of 1789-1791 and from what I’ve been able to gather, his tomb disappeared. Yet earlier this year while watching an episode of PBS’s science series NOVA about the graves found in Notre-Dame during its reconstruction, I noticed they pulled out a nineteenth-century book of old Parisian epitaphs. I did a quick search through the BnF’s Gallica database, and found Thevet’s own epitaph there transcribed from the original stone carved in 1592 that lay in the Convent of the Cordeliers. In the original French it reads:
Rue de Bièvre, where André Thevet once lived.
Cy gist venerable et scientifique personne Maistre Andre The-
vet, cosmographe de quatre roys, lequel estant aagé de LXXXVIII (88) ans, se-
roit decedé en ceste ville de Paris, le XXIII jour de Novembre M D XCII. –
Here lies the venerable and scientific person, Mr. André Thevet,
Cosmographer of Four Kings, who was 88 years of age,
he died in this city of Paris, the 23rd day of November 1592.
God, pray for him.
A Tupinambá war club once called “the Sword of Quoniambec” that I’m studying. Thevet brought it to France in 1556.
On that same trip I visited a wooden Tupinambá club which the Musée du Quai Branly records was donated to the royal collections by Thevet and was given to the cosmographer by the Tupinambá leader Quoniambec (d. 1555). I figured this would be the only artifact I’d see that Thevet would’ve himself handled. Little did I realize that eight months later I’d be back in Paris, this time at the BnF’s Richelieu building in the Department of Manuscripts reading through Thevet’s own handwriting. I’d made a visit there that day to read through Thevet’s translation of the Travels of Benjamin of Tudela, a twelfth-century Sephardi Jew from the northernmost reaches of Al-Andalus which told the story of his travels around the Mediterranean world. Tudela’s wanderings took place three centuries before Thevet made his own voyage east into the Mediterranean in 1551. Here, through the window Thevet crafted with his pen over 470 years before, I was reading a story retold in Thevet’s words of events that occurred over 700 years ago. That sunny June day, I spent a few quiet moments reflecting on Thevet’s penmanship, his signature, and how familiar his writing seemed. I’ve read more of Thevet than many others, after all I’ve translated the entirety of his Singularitez, and so when I was working with his Tudela translation, I found the job was made easier by how I could recognize his voice in the flourishes of his pen. I felt that I knew the man, in spite of the centuries between us. Soon after, as I walked from the Richelieu building to a café next to the Sorbonne where I was meeting an editor for a project I’m contributing to, I reflected amid my quick steps crossing the Seine that I was walking the same streets Thevet once walked. They’d changed to be sure, but there were still monuments that he’d recognize, edifices of the Paris he knew.
I chose to study Thevet out of a drive for practicality, a quick solution to a pressing problem of finding a dissertation topic that I could move to when my original plans went up in smoke. In the years since I’ve become known as a Thevet scholar. I’ve given many conference presentations and lectures about the man and his contributions to Renaissance natural history. In fact, I’ll be giving one more on June 12th with the Renaissance Society of America’s Graduate Student Lightning Talks, sponsored by the RSA Graduate Student Advisory Committee. That talk takes a different perspective on Thevet’s sloth than any other I’ve yet given, approaching it as an example of animal intelligence. Tune in to learn more.
[1] Alexander von Humboldt, “Les vieux voyageurs à la Terre Sainte (du XIVe au XVIe siècle),” Nouvelle annales des voyages, de la géographie et de l’histoire 135 (1853): 36–256, at 39.
[3] Émile Raunié, Épitaphier du vieux Paris, recueil général des inscriptions funéraires des églises, couvents, collèges, hospices, cimetières et charniers, depuis le moyen âge jusqu’à la fin du XVIIIe siècle. Vol. 1–3, Paris : 1890-1901), 302, n. 1171.
This week, the first in several scribblings about my research: how I connect historic places in my sources with their modern names.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
This week, the first in several scribblings about my research: how I connect historic places in my sources with their modern names.
When I started working on my dissertation and began downloading copies of André Thevet’s 1557 book Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique, I was struck by a curious question regarding the identity of some of the places which Thevet described along the disparate shores of the Atlantic Ocean in the middle of the sixteenth century. Some of these were readily accessible, the Portuguese fortress of Elmina for one remained an infamous outpost of the slave trade for centuries after Thevet’s 1555-1556 voyage. Likewise, Thevet made early references to regions like Florida, Mexico, Peru, and Brazil which are still known by those names today. I especially admire how he demonstrated the assimilative power of colonialization in the renaming of the Taíno island of Haiti into a newly christened European island literally called Little Spain, that is Hispaniola. Today, we know Haiti as the name of the western republic on the island of Hispaniola, and the Haitians as a people predominately of African descent, yet that term on its own originated with the indigenous inhabitants of that island and its neighbors.
André Thevet (1516-1590) from his Grande Insulaire.
This new world of names which Thevet hoisted upon the places he sought to describe in his Singularitez place that book in its historical context at the dawn of the European colonization of the broader Atlantic World and also in some cases provides a perspective on precolonial and early contact societies that have otherwise been diminished by the deluge of colonial toponyms which in many places replaced them. Thevet, like his fellow Frenchman Jacques Cartier, tended to use indigenous names for places, flora, and fauna. I’ve written in great detail about this concerning Thevet’s use of a French rendering of the Tupi name for the sloth, Haüt, and my dissertation includes similar analyses of the preservation of indigenous names for toucans, parrots, and macaws from Tupi for Thevet’s own French audience in his work. While his preference for indigenous names certainly added a lure of the exotic to his work, it is clear that he saw the utility of keeping these names and promulgating them to his readers.
When I am approaching a location in Thevet’s work I begin by seeing what the other editors and translators of Thevet down the last 468 years have done to familiarize what Thevet wrote for their audience. Thomas Hacket’s 1568 translation is beneficial to see how an Elizabethan reader might interpret distant Brazil and is useful for connecting Thevet’s Atlantic to Ralegh’s. Likewise, Giuseppe Horologgi’s 1562 translation is beneficial for understanding how Thevet was read by Italian humanists curious about the wider world; these readers were most likely thinking about Thevet’s stories in the context of the wider genre of travel literature typified in Italy by Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s (1485–1557) I Navigationi et Viaggi and for his natural history the collected works of Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605). Moving from Thevet’s contemporaries, I then turn to a nineteenth century French reprint of the Singularites (as they were rendered in Modern French) edited by Paul Gaffarel. This edition was published in 1878 at a time when interest in Thevet and sixteenth-century French Brazil had a resurgence during the Third Republic which lasted into the early career of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Alfred Métraux, the two most prominent French anthropologists to consider the value of Thevet and his rival Jean de Léry as primary sources on early contact Tupinambá culture. Finally, I will turn to the two modern Brazilian translations of Thevet, Estêvão Pinto’s from 1944 and Eugenio Amado’s from 1978. Together these two sources are often my first choice when tracking down taxa of Brazilian flora and fauna and confirming Brazilian demonyms and toponyms. I figure these translators tended to have better access to Brazilian archives and scientific studies concerning their own country than their European counterparts considering the great distance between these continents. Lastly, several partial modern English translations of Thevet exist which provide their own regional analyses, most notable of these is Roger Schlesinger and Arthur Stabler’s 1986 translation of Thevet’s North American chapters which does particular justice to Thevet’s account of Canada.
The best sort of contributions any of us can make to collective human knowledge is built upon the conclusions and efforts of our colleagues past and present. The academy is a collaborative effort that only survives as long as we believe in the value of our work and of each other. I was reminded of this when I was in Boston during the Renaissance Society of America’s annual conference in March and felt such a potent sense of jubilation at that experience of camaraderie, I felt spending those four days among friends and colleagues. I especially see this among my fellow grad students and early career scholars who are the future of higher education and who are engaged in their work to a degree that in the span of a doctorate we readily become experts in our own disparate fields yet find solace and support in that common experience.
Returning to the task at hand, once I have consulted each of these various editions and translations of Thevet’s Singularitez, I then turn to his Cosmographie Universelle, a two volume magnum opus which was published in 1575. Volume 1 contains his accounts of Asia and Africa, and Volume 2 collected knowledge about Europe and the Americas. Thankfully, the Cosmographie Universelle has a good set of indices crafted by Thevet himself, which make navigating this gargantuan work easier. At this point, six years into my study of the man my PDF files of this book have enough of my own highlights & notes that I’ve added my own layer of internal navigation atop the cosmographer’s original efforts. Often, the Cosmographie Universelle supplements the Singularitez and adds greater depth and detail to it. For one, I first recognized Thevet’s claim that the sloth was an animal which could “live only on air” in the Cosmographie Universelle, only later noting the same claim in Chapter 52 of his Singularitez. In the Cosmographie Universelle it’s actually pulled out as a section heading in the margins of the book.
If again, Thevet either uses the same name for the geographical feature in question without any further context or the feature all together isn’t mentioned I will then turn to his 1586 Grande Insulaire, an unpublished manuscript of his which was edited by the preeminent French Thevet scholar Frank Lestringant and released in book form in 2016 by the Genevan publisher Droz. Lestringant has a long career studying Thevet, and his footnotes on the cosmographer remain among the best around. Often, he’ll be able to identify the places I’m looking for, but again his specialty is the history of French Protestantism in the sixteenth century, so toponymy isn’t necessarily his focus in reading Thevet.
This then leaves the last resort: a quick internet search to see what comes up when I type in Thevet’s sixteenth-century name for a given location. Often, I have better luck searching French or Portuguese Google than English Google (google.fr or google.pt) or even the French or Portuguese editions of Wikipedia, though all results from both the search engine and online encyclopedia need to be taken with a grain of salt and tremendous care. Anything I find online needs to be double-checked with other sixteenth-century sources, often Spanish in origin, to determine where Thevet got his name for the place from.
With my method in place, I want to put it to use explaining how I identified one particularly confusing toponym which Thevet used to describe a city on the coast of Peru. First, let me say that Thevet had a very broad understanding of Peru which included the entire side of South America west of the Andes, Panama, most of Central America, and the Caribbean archipelago beyond. Knowing this, I began by ignoring the word Peru and focusing instead on the coordinates Thevet ascribed to this city. He wrote in Volume 2, Book 22, Chapter 8 of his Cosmographie Universelle that this city was located “22 degrees from the Equator.”[1] Thevet used a Ptolemaic system for determining degrees of latitude, writing in the Singularitez that the Earth was divided into “360 degrees, and each degree is divided into 70 miles, which equals 16.5 leagues (96.48 km).”[2] By this calculation, the Earth’s circumference should be 34,732.8 km, which is 5,342.217 km short of the actual circumference at the Equator. This is a fitting comparison to make because the region where this city of “Saint Iacques” was located because it was certainly Equatorial in latitude considering he placed it among the cities of Quito & Ingapirca, which are located in modern Ecuador and Cusco & Cajamarca, which are located in modern Peru.
A frame from Abraham Ortellius’s map of the Americas, 1587, showing Thevet’s Sainct Iacques as S. Tiago.
Generally, I found that Thevet’s degrees of latitude tend to be about double their modern equivalents, though this is a rough and often incorrect assessment. In this instance, that theory led me to search maps of the Peruvian coast around 11ºS looking for towns called Santiago, the Spanish translation of the Middle French Sainct Jacques. After spending a day searching, I gave up on this particular effort for the first time. Weeks later though, I returned to it after a conversation with frequent Wednesday Blog reader and one of my best friends Carmelita Bahamonde, who pointed out to me that her Ecuadorean hometown’s official, long name is Santiago de Guayaquil. I looked into it, and found several pages later hidden amid the text that Thevet had clarified further about this particular city of Sainct Jacques, writing that it was “the old port formerly named Guayaquil.”[3] I put this oversight at not finding this information where it was in that same source to my own poor eyesight, yet I remain grateful to my friend for confirming her hometown’s presence in Thevet’s Atlantic cosmography. He went into further detail about Guayaquil’s Spanish founder, the conquistador Francisco de Orellana (1511–1546) who led the first successful European expedition down the Amazon from the Andes to the Atlantic, losing almost all of his men along the way to desertion, disease, and attacks by the locals who knew to not welcome the Spaniards. In fact, when I began hearing about the lost Amazonian civilization first on PBS’s NOVA and later in one of my magazines, I believe it was in Smithsonian, I nearly leapt from my chair shouting “Thevet wrote about them!”
The Franco-Tupinambá trade partnership in action from Thevet’s Cosmographie Universelle, vol. 2, 21.16, f. 950v. BNF, Public Domain.
The value of André Thevet’s books lie in their character as sources for understanding the Americas just at the moment of these continents’ invention as the fourth part of a larger global world. The Singularitez and Cosmographie Universelle offer stories and perspectives of peoples and places that had not yet been subsumed into the colonial deluge that would submerge so much of the indigenous cultures of these continents in the coming centuries. This week, my colleague (and newly minted Ph.D.) Mary Katherine Newman at Oxford published a blog post with the History Workshop on restoring indigenous historical practices to equal prominence with the written European archive that we historians are trained to use. In many respects, Thevet did this, albeit through the perspective of a sense of civilizational hierarchy which was the accepted norm of his day. Métraux wrote that Thevet was the better of the sixteenth-century travelers to visit Brazil when it came to finding the precolonial and early contact Tupinambá in that same written archive. In my work, I’ve made a strong effort at acknowledging Tupinambá agency in their colonial encounters with the French, who were interested in trading with the locals rather than conquering, colonizing, or converting them. This allowed for a vibrant trading partnership to develop between the French and the Tupinambá which lasted through the mid 1560s. French colonial efforts might have taken off in Brazil had the colony, named France Antarctique, survived its first decade. Through a mix of sectarian infighting and increasing Portuguese dominance along the Brazilian coast, the French were expelled from France Antarctique by 1567. Still, one French toponym survives; the island where the French built their fort, which they named Fort Coligny, is today still known in Portuguese as Ilha da Villegagnon, after France Antarctique’s governor, Admiral Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon (1510–1571), the man who brought Thevet to Brazil to serve as the colony’s chaplain.
[1] Thevet, Cosmographie Universelle, vol. 2, 22.8, f. 970a.
This week, how I take nuance and particularity into account in my efforts as a translator.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
This week, how I take nuance and particularity into account in my efforts as a translator.
When I chose to study André Thevet (1516–1590) and the three-toed sloth in August 2019 I did so because I already knew French and the need to learn a new language was less pressing than if I’d chosen to study another source in the history of natural history. I chose Thevet because it was practical, and I chose the sloth because the thought of being a sloth historian made me laugh. From the first day working on Thevet, I found that my understanding of his books was heightened when I took the time to type out my own translations of his text. Thevet wrote in Middle French that is native to the middle decades of the sixteenth century. I arrived at this project very familiar with Early Modern English, the contemporary form of this language to Thevet’s time, as my history master’s thesis delt with sources in that chronological variety of English from Thevet’s generation and the one just before. I’ve never had much trouble understanding the most prolific author of Early Modern English literature, Shakespeare, but I think I’ve had a tolerance for varieties in speech that’s allowed for me to try to think beyond my own millennial Midwestern metropolitan American English and be willing to understand the likes of Shakespeare from a young age.
So, when I began translating passages from Thevet’s Singularitezde la France Antarctique for my own professional use in my dissertation, I decided that as long as I was translating that book I might as well translate it with the intention of sharing Thevet’s words beyond the scholarly analysis and critique which lie at the heart of my work as a historian. This first draft is built around the 1558 French edition published by Christophe Plantin (c. 1520–1589) in Antwerp and contains footnotes drawn from the 1878 French edition by Paul Gaffarel published in Paris, two Brazilian Portuguese translations by Sergio Amado (1978) and Estêvão Pinto (1944, using the 2018 reprint), and the partial 1986 English translation by Arthur Stabler and Roger Schlesinger which contains only Thevet’s North American chapters.
I finished the first draft of this translation in Summer 2023 and am now looking ahead toward the second draft which is the next stage of the project, and I hope the last one before I feel confident in formally writing to the publishing editors whose press sales agents I’ve spoken with about this project at conferences over the last two years. The second draft will consist of two main stages. First, I will cross-reference my translation and the 1558 Antwerp edition on which it is primarily based with the 1557 first and 1558 second editions published in Paris by Maurice de la Porte, two Venetian editions translated into Italian by Giuseppe Horologgi and published by Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari (c. 1508–1578) in 1561 and 1584, and the 1568 full English translation by Thomas Hacket published in London by Henry Bynneman. Second, I will seek to make my translation more understandable for a 21st century English-speaking reader while endeavoring to preserve Thevet’s particular mannerisms and voice, a writing style with which I’ve become quite familiar in the last 6 years to the point that I can now confirm at least two French translated manuscripts in the Bibliothèque nationale’s collections in Paris are verifiably written by Thevet. He had a way of writing that’s unmistakable.
These two competing axes create a binary star system around which my translation revolves. On the one hand, I want to be true to the original text, to preserve the author’s voice and something of their spirit which remains in those words. On the other hand, I need to make my efforts readable for my own contemporaries. Thevet and his contemporaries are notorious for long run-on sentences that would make Hemingway shake his head in earnest frustration. Where do I break up a long sentence while preserving its overall integrity? Furthermore, at what point should I decided to remove the bracketed notations of page breaks in the original text? There the 1558 Antwerp edition is most fully evident as its pagination has several quirks that make it stand out from the 1557 & 1558 Paris editions. At this point, Plantin published books with folio numbers rather than page numbers, so the first two pages were in fact folios 1 recto (1r) and 1 verso (1v). These names refer to the custom that scribes traditionally started writing on the back side of the vellum (recto in Latin) and then flipped the skin over once ready to continue writing on the verso, or opposite side. In several instances the folio numbers actually decrease in the book, notably in Thevet’s chapter on the sloth, which makes the footnotes on that core element of my research particularly confusing if you’re paying close enough attention. So, in summation the inclusion of the page breaks with the folio numbers keeps my translation grounded in Plantin’s edition, however that may break up the text in an uncomfortable way for some readers.
Ultimately, I am not the author of this book, merely a herald relaying it on for our time. My voice is there in the handful of introductory chapters I’ve written to go along with this book. These chapters describe Thevet as a reader of travel literature and place his accounts of the Americas beyond what he himself saw in Brazil in the context of their French and Spanish sources. I see my efforts in this as a means of introducing the reader to Thevet, a man who today exists on the furthest margins of the popular imagination of the First Age of Exploration in the English-speaking world. Thevet remains present in academic circles, there were at least four papers presented at this weekend’s annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Boston which discussed Thevet, mine included. I hope this book will be useful to fellow academics and perhaps will entice curious readers to learn more about this man who I’ve spent the last 6 years of my life getting to know.I find myself drawn as much to the effort of a translator as I do to the work of a historian these days. We live in such a fractious time when reasoned debate and earnest discourse is riddled with dangers and seemingly improbable to undertake. I feel as though I’m constantly translating my thoughts and character for others to understand me. It’s why I enjoyed my time in Boston because that city has a large enough Irish American population that when I’d tell my name to a cashier to put on a carry-out order they’d actually spell it in the proper Irish manner; this never happens in Kansas City. That said, I felt that I had to translate my expectations and personal limits to be able to live even for just a few days in a city as expensive as Boston where I was often paying double what I’d normally pay at home in restaurants. In translating I recognize that each of us think in slightly different ways and see the world in which we all live in just as unfamiliar terms to one another. Difference enhances our common humanity and elevates our manner to something greater than ourselves.
This week, some words on the places I visited and the people I met on this North American Tour I finished on Sunday.
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This week, some words on the places I visited and the people I met on this North American Tour I finished on Sunday.
Earlier this year when I began to consider which conferences I would like to attend in Fall 2024, I knew from the start that my old stalwart of the Sixteenth Century Society would be top of the list. I was also interested in attending the History of Science Society’s conference for the first time after meeting a fair number of attendees from the 2023 meeting last year at my workshop in Brussels. Two conferences in two weeks is a fair amount of travel to undertake and money to spend. Yet there was more to be planned, for in midsummer I read a notice from the Society for the History of Discoveries about a special issue of their journal Terrae Incognitae about animals and exploration. I sent in a proposal which was accepted, leading to an outstanding offer to submit an article for the issue which I’m editing. So, knowing it would be good to meet the people of the SHD, I decided to submit a proposal to their conference as well.
If you’re keeping count, that means I went to three conferences in the last three weeks. I decided to call the series of talks my North American Conference Tour because this would take me not only to San Antonio but to Toronto and Mérida as well. I often thought about trying to do something like this where I visited two or three of the big continental countries in North America in short order; when I lived in Binghamton I fancied the idea of driving the 4 hours south to D.C. one day to sit in the gallery of the House of Representatives only to turn around soon after and drive back through Binghamton up Interstate 81 and across the St. Lawrence River to Ottawa to sit in the gallery of the Canadian House of Commons later that week. That never happened, in part because of the pandemic, yet I’ve undertaken similar trips in Europe on many an occasion so why would it be any more challenging here in North America?
The greatest challenge in this tour was that unlike stopping in Brussels, London, and Paris on a big European tour, I would need to fly between each of these cities and Kansas City in order to be where I needed to be in a prompt manner. I was excited by the prospect that all three of these cities could be reached in one way or another by direct flights from Kansas City. In the case of Mérida, the capital of Mexico’s Yucatan state, I would need to fly into Cancún and take the recently opened Tren Maya four hours east to Mérida to use that direct flight on Southwest. As it turned out though, I only had one direct flight throughout the entire tour. Southwest offers direct flights between Kansas City and San Antonio every other day, and they don’t fly that route on Wednesdays, so instead I flew to San Antonio with a couple hour connection at Lambert Field in St. Louis. Air Canada’s daily nonstop Toronto to Kansas City service only runs in a seasonal pattern and the season for that route ended 1 week before I was due to fly to the capital of Ontario, resulting in me having connections at the start and end of the trip in my original hometown at Chicago O’Hare. Then there was Mérida. I did seriously consider flying into Cancún rather than Mérida proper for the benefit of the direct flight. Yet the benefit of flying into Mérida itself and the still limited Tren Maya schedule meant I would still have to stay overnight in Cancún before flying home. So, I booked flights on United to Mérida through Houston Bush Airport which included an 8 hour layover on the way out and an 11 hour layover on the way home. I figured I could take advantage of the time in Houston in some way or another.
San Antonio
The Alamo
I traveled to San Antonio with my Mom, who jumped at the opportunity to spend a few days in that city. I’d only ever spent a few hours there about a decade ago when we were in Austin at my Mom’s office over her birthday weekend in May 2015. That visit to the Alamo City was cut short though by heavy rains and flooding. On this instance though, I fell in love with San Antonio. It often reminded me of the best parts of San Diego, another near-border city, yet it still felt closer to home both geographically and in its approachability. Before joining in the conference there at the Menger Hotel, we took a tour of the old Spanish missions south of downtown along the San Antonio River.
These four: Missions Concepción, San José, San Juan Capistrano, and San Francisco de la Espada brought the deep colonial history of this part of South Texas into focus. The tour guide explained that the Spanish decided to establish missions in Texas starting in 1715 in order to block French expansion from their new colony of Louisiane to the east along the Mississippi River. This was a full 200 years after the first Spanish conquistadores ventured north into Texas from their Viceroyalty of New Spain centered around Mexico City. The Franciscan missionaries who were sent north in the eighteenth century came from the Mexican city of Querétaro, some 740 miles (1,191 km) south by foot. Along with them came groups of colonists from the Canary Islands who were sent to establish a Hispanic presence around these missions alongside the majority indigenous population. The story of the Spanish colonization of Texas is a mixed one of both the story of the creation of a new ethnicity in the Tejanos, descendants of the Canarians and other Spanish colonists and the indigenous Texans including the Coahuiltecans, Payaya, and Pastia. Yet the other side of this story is the forced assimilation of these indigenous peoples to a new colonial way of life centered on the missions and their Catholic faith.
There is one more point I want to raise about the sudden Spanish urge to establish missions in Texas after 1715. This sudden colonial interest in Texas began after the War of Spanish Succession which was waged between 1701 and 1714 after the death of the last Habsburg monarch over the Spanish Empire, Charles II. Charles named Philip of Anjou, a grandson of Louis XIV of France as his heir, with Louis intending on having Philip succeed him as King of France as well, and uniting the French and Spanish Empires in a personal union. This terrified the Austrian Habsburgs, the Dutch Republic, and England & Scotland which in 1707 would unite to become the Kingdom of Great Britain. These opponents of the Bourbon succession of Philip of Anjou called themselves the Grand Alliance, and eventually won the war which was one of the first European wars to be fought in the Americas as well. In the peace that followed with the Peace of Utrecht, concluded by 1715, allowed Philip to keep the Spanish throne as King Philip V yet he had to renounce his claim to the French throne to ensure France and Spain would not unite in any fashion. Since 1715 then, the House of Bourbon-Anjou have held the title of King of Spain, in the process also unifying the older Crowns of Castile and Aragon save for several interregna during the Napoleonic invasion between 1808 and 1813, the First Spanish Republic of 1873-1874, the Second Spanish Republic of 1931–1939, and the Franco Regime which ruled from 1936 –1975.
With all this in mind if in 1715 France and Spain were newly ruled by members of the same family, why would it be as imperative for the Spanish to block the French from expanding further to the southwest out of the Mississippi Basin and into Texas? My suspicion may be that this intention was driven more by the fears of the viceregal officials in Mexico City than their royal counterparts in Madrid. Any of my eighteenth-century Latin American historian readers who may know the answer are invited to write in.
One of the finer parts of San Antonio is its river walk, which stretches along both banks of the San Antonio River through downtown and continues beyond the urban core as a series of foot and bike paths. We consistently saw mile markers for the river walk along our tour of the missions to the south of the urban core. Most evenings we walked from our hotel to the river and had dinner at one of the many restaurants that line its banks. My favorite of these meals were the enchiladas I had at the Original Mexican Restaurant, which was as touristy as it could get, I even paid a mariachi band to serenade my Mom with a song while we ate, yet it was still a delight.
My enchiladas at the Original Mexican Restaurant
We stayed at the Menger Hotel, an old historic edifice of San Antonio that was built by William and Mary Menger, a pair of German immigrants who arrived in San Antonio in 1847, just three years after the Republic of Texas was annexed into the United States. They opened the hotel in 1859 hoping it would increase business for the family’s brewery. The hotel is located on Alamo Plaza next to the old Alamo mission, originally named the Mission of San Antonio de Valéro, and so was built on the battlegrounds of the Alamo. The plaza was largely under construction during our trip as a new Alamo Museum is being built. I was struck to find the street we crossed the last time we visited the Alamo was gone, replaced by a fully pedestrianized Alamo Plaza that will certainly improve the vibrancy of the neighborhood once the work is finished. Upon arrival we had lunch in the Menger Bar, famous as the place where Theodore Roosevelt gathered many of the men who would sign up to join his Rough Riders in 1898 to go fight in the Spanish American War in Cuba. The bar and the hallway just beyond it are full of T.R.’s relics.
The Menger was host this year to the annual meeting of the Society for the History of Discoveries (SHD) which met alongside the Texas Map Society. I didn’t attend the Texas Map Society meeting on Thursday, instead choosing to go tour the missions with my Mom but was delighted to get to meet the other members of the SHD who I only knew to that point through our email correspondence. I presented on Saturday morning, mine was the first paper to be read that day. In my paper, I discussed how André Thevet tried to synthesize eyewitness testimony from two other explorers: Antonio Pigafetta’s account of Patagonia and Francisco de Orellana’s account of Amazonia with his own account of Brazil to create a full cosmography of the Americas as they existed at the time he wrote his Singularities of France Antarctique in 1557. In the sixteenth century, the word cosmography referred to the amalgamation of cartography, ethnology, geography, and natural history to craft as full a narrative about the known world as possible. As a part of my dissertation research, I translated Thevet’s Singularites from Middle French into Modern English and am now applying for postdoctoral fellowships that can help me finish the job of preparing to submit my translation for publication by an academic press.
The Menger’s Victorian Lobby
I truly loved my time in San Antonio this Fall, and like the other two cities I visited for these three conferences I would’ve been happy to spend more time there. On Saturday evening, we drove north to Austin to see friends who I hadn’t seen since the recent pandemic. I was struck by the stark differences between San Antonio, the old Tejano city, and Austin the gleaming new metropolis driven by tech money. Still, on Sunday, 27 October we returned home on the only direct flight you’ll hear about in this week’s edition of the Wednesday Blog. I had two days at home, during which I worked both days, before heading out again.
Toronto
Toronto’s Union Station with the CN Tower looming behind it.
This time, I traveled to the Great Lakes region and back to one of my favorite cities that I hadn’t been able to visit since 2019. Toronto is not only the largest city in Canada today, it is also like San Antonio a crossroads, yet this is a place where Canada, the United States, and the many immigrant communities with ties to the Commonwealth and the old British Empire meet. I’ve often thought of Toronto as a city similar to my original hometown of Chicago, just cleaner and with a very different set of immigrant communities owing to Canada’s longer connections to Britain and the Empire than our own. I had a 4 hour connection in Chicago at O’Hare Airport, during which time I walked the full length of Terminals 1, 2, and 3, a good 5 km at least to pass the time. Terminal 1 retains its fine 1980s architecture, the soft whites, blues, grays, and blacks from its tile floor and steel frame still as it always has been. Terminals 2 and 3 however need some work. I was struck by how dark and drab Terminal 3 seemed; this is actually one reason why I fly on United instead of American, I would rather connect at O’Hare in Terminals 1 or 2 than in Terminal 3 just for the nicer architecture of Terminal 1.
O’Hare Terminal 1 (left) and Terminal 3 (right).
I arrived in Toronto later in the evening on Wednesday, 30 October and took the UP Express train from Pearson Airport into Union Station, near which I was staying with a friend, Hariprasad Ashwene. Toronto reminded me more of Austin with its gleaming towers, though that is more of the North American standard that the urban core should have skyscrapers to make the most of what little land is available. The biggest thing about that city which struck me was that compared to my previous visit almost 5 years to the day beforehand, was how much warmer it was there. The last time I’d walked through Queen’s Park at the end of October it had been snowing. This time though, I only had to wear the sweater I’d brought on the last day of my trip when the warm weather that our continent had basked in began to fade. On the day I landed, Kansas City experienced its first rain in nearly 2 months, yet that rain came with high winds, thunderstorms, and tornadoes across the Great Plains and Midwest and resulted in both of my flights that day being quite bumpy with hard landings across the board.
Hari Prasad and I on the lakeshore.
These are all clear signs of climate change, and it baffles me that we aren’t doing more about it. This trip, just like the San Antonio one, would have made a decent one by high speed rail. From Kansas City I would’ve again connected in Chicago before heading northeast to Toronto via Detroit. As it stood, I saw my second flight fly over the Ambassador and Gordie Howe Bridges connecting Detroit with Windsor, Ontario on that northeasterly route. To San Antonio, it would’ve required a connection probably in Fort Worth which seems to be Amtrak’s big future Texas hub based on the Federal Railroad Administration’s (F.R.A.) Amtrak Daily Long-Distance Service Study released in March of this year.
I traveled to Toronto to participate in the annual meeting of the Sixteenth Century Society (SCS), the one conference that I’ve attended year in and year out the longest. My first trip to the SCS was in 2019 when we met in St. Louis. That was also the last conference where I presented research derived from my History Master’s thesis written at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC). This time, I was presenting a very similar paper to the one I’d presented in San Antonio, only instead of looking at Amazonia and Patagonia I turned to specific animals which Thevet described in his Singularites that he himself did not see and try to trace the origins of what he wrote.
Speaking at the Sixteenth Century Society’s 2024 Conference at the Sheraton Centre Hotel in Toronto.
The first of these two was the manatee (Trichechus manatus), which Thevet described living in the Florida Straits. His manatee account was drawn directly from the one that appears in Book 13 of the Historia General y Natural de las Indias written in 1535 by the Spanish naturalist Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés (1478–1557). The second was an account of a wild and hairy American bull, what we today know as the American bison (Bison bison) which Thevet drew from Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s (1485–1557) recounting of Oviedo’s recording of the Relación written by the conquistador Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (c. 1488–1559). Cabeza de Vaca was one of only a handful of survivors of a failed Spanish expedition to explore and claim territories north of New Spain in the deserts and mountains of the Mexican-American borderlands. In San Antonio then I was delighted to hear a presentation given by a professor at Texas A&M Corpus Christi and one of his former students, a local high school history teacher earning his Ph.D. at the same university in secondary education, about a course the professor taught on Cabeza de Vaca’s travels in Summer 2020. I spoke with the high school teacher the following day about my own presentation that was coming up the following weekend in Toronto whether I was correct in placing Cabeza de Vaca’s bison sighting in South Texas near Corpus Christi Bay along the Nueces River. He did confirm that it was a probable place where that could’ve happened, and so armed with this new affirmation I gave what became one of my best public talks to date at the SCS. It turned out though that I missed one link in the chain, for Thevet’s bison picture originated in the 1555 Cronica de la Nueva España written by Francisco López de Gómara (1511 – c. 1566).
The famed poutail from Beaver Tails.
While in Toronto I took some time to enjoy that city. I visited the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) on the morning of All Saints’ Day, the Friday of that week. The ROM is in my opinion one of the better museums in North America, and a good marriage of natural history with human history and archeology. I like how if you climb the stairs there you have to go past the paleontology and zoology portions to get up to the galleries exhibiting artifacts from human cultures past and present. It really demonstrates that we are all a part of this same natural world, no matter how unnatural our inventions may become. On Saturday, before my talk Hari Prasad and I visited the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), where the medieval and early modern European art and Canadian art are the two main highlights. That afternoon after presenting we spent a good bit of time walking along the lakeshore and seeing some of the natural beauty of that city. Lake Ontario is far narrower than Lake Michigan, and so whereas you can only really see the opposite shore from the top of the Sears, now Willis Tower, you can see Niagara and Upstate New York from the tops of Toronto’s highest lakefront towers, as they are just under 100 miles (161 km) to the south. I ate a lot of poutine in Toronto, though less than the last time I visited. I even tried a poutail from the ice cream shop called Beaver Tails on the Harbourfront, which was poutine placed atop a frybread baked into the shape of a beaver tail. It was good, though it did attract a large audience of birds.
My Torontonian visit was about the right length, and in the circumstances of the world as they were that week where my mind was less on the current moment in Canada and more on the next trip to Mexico and the election due to be decided in the days in between I was ready to be home.
Mérida
I left home again at 5:00 am on Wednesday, 6 November, knowing the overall result of our elections had taken a sorry turn that will only be fully understood after these next four years are over. Because of the result I didn’t want to travel that morning, rather I wanted to stay home and close to my family. I was distraught and in no mood for another adventure. Yet an adventure is what was in store, and I took the first flight out of Kansas City on United to Houston’s Bush Intercontential Airport at 6:30 that morning. I’m not sure if it’s because of the flight schedules between Kansas City and Houston on United or if it’s because of the ones between Houston and Mérida but I had excessively long connections on both my outbound and return flights on this trip. On the way out, I spent 8 hours in the United Club close to the gate where my Mérida bound flight left from that evening. I was delighted to see several familiar faces on my Mérida flight, a good half if not 2/3rds of the passengers on that flight were fellow historians on their way to the History of Science Society’s centennial conference at the Fiesta Americana Hotel in Mérida.
After we landed my inadequacies in Spanish made themselves well and clear from the first moment. I gave the driver who picked me up at the airport the wrong address, and ended up at a hotel 2 miles (3 km) from where I was supposed to be. I ended up getting an Uber to take me to the correct place, arriving there close to 21:30, and was able to get dinner from the hotel kitchen by 23:00. Exhausted, I had a quick sleep before waking early around 06:00 and walking the 5 minutes north to the Fiesta Americana where I exchanged 45 dollars for around 850 pesos, got breakfast, and met more people who like me were going on the Thursday tour of the Mayan city of Uxmal, whose ruins are about 45 minutes drive-time to the south of Mérida. Mérida is a Spanish colonial city built atop an older Mayan city named Ti’ho. The Cathedral of San Ildefeonso in the city’s central plaza was built using stones from the older Mayan pyramids that were once found here.
South of Mérida, Uxmal was a fascinating place to visit. This city once housed around 30,000 people, and its pyramids still rise above the jungle canopy. It was all that I hoped it would be and more, a monument to the ancestors of the people of the Yucatec Mayans who are still the majority population in the Yucatán State and in Mérida, its capital. The tour started with the Pyramid of the Magician, the great central monument of the site, after which we walked past the Palace of the Governors, and then to the High Pyramid and the South Pyramid before descending down the steps of the latter and walking to the Ballcourt dedicated in the year 901 CE by the city’s king Chan Chak K’ak’nal Ajaw where the old Mesoamerican ballgame was played. The pyramids here have a rounder shape than those at Chichen Itza, and the Pyramid of the Magician seems to be a series of temples built one atop the other.
I spent most of my time in Mérida either at the Fiesta Americana or at my hotel in the Paseo 60 complex, a few minutes’ walk to the south. I’d intended to venture out to visit some of the city’s museums, including the Gran Museo del Mundo Maya and see the older Spanish urban core, including going to Mass at the Cathedral, but as it happened after returning from Uxmal I didn’t get very far from the conference. This was my first visit to Mexico, and there was a lot there to get used to that was different from any other country I’ve yet been to. I was struck by how affordable everything was compared to the United States. At the time 1 dollar would get you about 20 pesos, and in general everything was much cheaper than in San Antonio or Toronto let alone in Kansas City. Still, seeing prices listed in hundreds and thousands of pesos was a bit of a shock to me at first. I was very careful to not drink the water, using bottled water to brush my teeth, and keeping my mouth shut tight while showering. Where in San Antonio and Toronto there was water available in pitchers for us to pour into our own glasses and bottles, in Mérida there were bottles of water at every break alongside the coffee and pastries. Yet beyond all of this the one thing I was most worried about among all the usual domestic concerns was the inability of the plumbing to take flushed paper. This turned out to be less of an issue than I expected, though for the sake of the sanity of this post I’ll leave that topic be.
The Fiesta Americana Hotel in Mérida
This was my first visit to the History of Science Society’s (HSS) conference, and it certainly won’t be my last. I reconnected with several people who I’ve known off and on over the last five years in my doctoral studies and met many more people whose work I found fascinating and whose company I greatly enjoyed. I attended more sessions at this conference than at the Sixteenth Century Society, in part because two of the sessions I planned on attending at the SCS were cancelled. Perhaps this speaks to a stronger presence of early modern historians of science in the HSS than at the SCS, both conferences compete with each other as their meetings happen at the same time of year, opposite to the Renaissance Society of America’s annual conference in the Spring. Still, when I left Mérida, I found myself sad to leave these people, colleagues and friends, who I’d gotten to know in a few short days.
At the HSS, I presented a paper drawn from Chapter 3 of my dissertation which summarized my argument that Thevet’s eyewitness description of the southern maned sloth (Bradypus crinitus) reflected the gradual shift in the sixteenth century from humanism, a discourse centered on established learning from antiquity, toward the scientific developments of the seventeenth century. This then was my only presentation among the three conferences that was drawn from my dissertation rather than the introductory essays for my translation of Thevet’s Singularites. The SHD and SCS papers will likely end up in the same essay as they cover very similar topics to the point that in moments in between conferences when I’ve attempted to explain what each of them were about, and I couldn’t remember one or another of them. That however speaks as much to the number of presentations I was giving in short order: I knew I had the papers written, printed, and placed in the correct file folders and that the slides were ready to go. All I needed to do was run a couple of rehearsals beforehand and then read the papers on the day of. What ended up happening was a bit different, following from advice I received earlier this year I tried going off script a bit more than usual. At the SCS this worked really well, though I did end up going 3 minutes over my allotted 20. Meanwhile at the HSS, knowing I only had 15 minutes to present and that the recurring technical problems during our session had taken a minute or two from the presentations, I decided to end mine early cutting some comments about the philosophy of animal behavioral psychology that I’d brought in from David Peña-Guzmán’s book When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness.
One of the Mayan dishes I ate while in Mérida was perhaps the most famous of these: cochinita pibil, a Yucatec barbecued pork.
Houston
Houstonian Humidity. Photo taken from outside the Christopher C. Kraft, Jr. Mission Control Center at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
On the way home from Mérida I had an 11 hour layover at Houston Bush Airport again, and this time instead of staying in the United Club and working I decided to take the day to visit the Space Center Houston, the visitor’s center next to NASA’s Johnson Space Center. At the beginning of the year, I looked into visiting the Space Center and booking a VIP tour of the International Space Station’s Mission Control Center, and had the trip planned out and at a reasonable price but still ended up choosing to not go to save money, a wise decision seeing how 2024 has turned out. So, on Sunday, 10 November I rented a Volkswagen Jetta from Hertz and drove across Houston to the Space Center. It turned out to be a marvelous place to explore, at times in spite of the crowds of which there were more than I expected. My only comparisons to this are visits to the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum in Washington and to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor’s Complex in Florida. The former is far more the museum like Space Center Houston, both very busy, while the latter is more like the other Central Florida theme parks, albeit a government owned theme park dedicated to space exploration.
I arrived close to 12:30, a good 2 hours after landing, and was at first taken aback by just how busy the place was for a Sunday at midday. One part of that was that the Houston Texans weren’t playing until later in the day, which meant more locals and tourists for the visiting Detroit Lions were taking the midday hours to do some sightseeing. My first stop in the Space Center was the Artemis gallery displaying all things associated with NASA’s international program to return humans to the Moon for the first time since Apollo 17 landed in December 1972, almost 20 years to the day before I was born. There was a board where NASA invited members of the public to leave questions for the Artemis II astronauts, who are due to launch for the first crewed lunar orbit of the program no earlier than September 2025. I usually avoid these sorts of things, in a similar vein to why I like to avoid clicking on the ads on Google or any of my social media sites solely out of the enjoyment at seeing the big guy not getting my vote by engaging with their stuff. This time though was different, because as I’ve written before here on The Wednesday Blog, I worry that we may be going to Space for the wrong reasons: for profit, or glory, or conquest rather than for curiosity, or exploration, or hope that we might learn more about ourselves in finding what’s out there. My question then was this:
“How do you hope the Artemis missions will inspire humanity to become better versions of ourselves?”
This speaks to something that’s at the heart of what I do, of why I study the history of sloths in the 1550s. In that study I hope to find something about how Thevet interacted and reacted to the sloth he observed for 26 days that can tell me more about how he fit that sloth into his understanding of nature as a whole. In it beyond the study though, I hope I might learn something more about how to better interact with unfamiliar people, creatures, and things that I encounter in my life. Travel is the search for new things to know to enrich our lives by that experiential learning we do. The highlight of my visit to Houston on Sunday was touring the rooms that house the Apollo Mission Control Center where the first contact between our first human explorers to set foot on another world were first received by humans here on Earth. I know this room all too well, in fact I wonder if my fondness for the white tile aesthetic that I used to see in grocery stores or even some school classrooms isn’t in fact drawn from fond memories watching recordings of those TV broadcasts from 20 July 1969 when Apollo 11 made its landing on the lunar surface. I learned years ago to keep my camera out of my hands for most of my life and to let myself experience these moments that I have with my own eyes, and so while I did take 11 photos of the Apollo Mission Control Center while in the viewing gallery, I refrained from switching my camera to record video of the experience like many around me did. I’d rather remember those moments spent watching as the critical moments of the Moon landing played out in front of me and preserve them, however imperfectly, within my own memory that those moments get tinted with nostalgic yellowing like old paper as they age. I in fact found myself looking around Mission Control searching for all the parts of it that I know from the Apple TV+ show For All Mankind, which is one of my favorite new shows of the last five years and features Mission Control as one of its primary settings.
At the end of the day, in spite of any other troubles or annoyances that beset me, and there were some of those, I was still happy that I took the opportunity to visit the Space Center and see where one of the great vehicles of hope that remain in these dark years does its work. We may find that our best solutions to our climate crisis and to the multitude of human crises from our nigh insatiable greed or our unholy cruelty we inflict upon one another and ourselves may find a balm in reaching out and exploring our Solar System and those of other stars. I’m an optimist, even if my optimism is covered by all the debris of our pessimistic time. I hope that when Artemis II successfully orbits the Moon, and Artemis III lands humans on the Moon to establish the first lunar permanent outpost of our species that we will celebrate these accomplishments as things undertaken for all humanity and not for one nation or tribe. Our troubles today, I hope, are signs that we are beginning to move out of what Carl Sagan called our adolescence as a species and into the years when our future will really begin to look bright again.
In spite of all these troubles, this North American Tour gave me reason to hope that my future, and our future as a whole, has such great promise and opportunity if only we keep working for it and never give up the fight.
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 