A Sense of Purpose – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane
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.
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 