Tag Archives: Renaissance Society of America

A choripán sandwich from Los Hornos Argentinian Flavors in Kansas City, Missouri photographed by the author just before it was eaten by the same.

On Language Acquisition

On Language Acquisition – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, how living in a culture is required to speak a language in depth.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane—Sources: [1] “A Letter from San Juan,” Wednesday Blog 3.29.[2] “The North American Tour,” Wednesday Blog 5.34.
Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

This week, how living in a culture is required to speak a language in depth.

The languages which I speak are directly responsible for the ways my life has turned, its winding path a result of the words I use and the ideas they represent. Language is the voice of culture; it evokes the rich harmony of thought that comes from seeing things from certain points of view. At the University of Westminster, I was regularly in classes where there were maybe 10 or 20 languages spoken between each of the students, if not more. English remained our common language and the language of instruction, yet how many of us must have been switching between English and their own native language as they thought about the readings and topics in political philosophy and science which we discussed on a given day? Even then, my English is not the same as the King’s English, nor is it the same as the English I heard spoken when I drove through Alabama in July 2022. Language then reflects our individual circumstances of experience. Knowledge is gained through experience first and foremost, whether that experience be theoretical through books or practical through lived experience. I make this distinction because I often feel that when I’m reading a particularly well written book that I can actually imagine the characters as real people who I might meet in my life. The best TV shows and films are like that, their casts that we see regularly begin to seem like old friends who we look forward to visiting again and again.

Language acquisition is a lot like this for me. Today, I speak three languages: English, Irish, and French, and I can read Latin, Italian, Catalan, Spanish, and Portuguese and some Ancient Greek. I break my languages down into these two categories by their utility in my life. The handful which I can read are those which I’ve worked with in my historical capacity. I’ve spoken Italian and Spanish from time to time, yet those moments of elocution are few and far between. The same could be said for my German, though it’s now been five years since I last spoke that language in Munich, and at time of writing I can’t say that I’d be much use in remembering it today. This is even more true for my Mandarin, a language which I studied for a semester in between my two master’s degrees out of pure curiosity. I can remember the pronouns, a couple of verbs, and a noun or two but that’s about it. All this to say that I may know something about German and Mandarin yet it’s little more than a foundation for the future when I might be faced with a desire or need to learn the language properly.

I’ve been thinking lately that of any of these I need to work most on my Spanish, the most useful of these languages for me to speak here in the United States. I can understand Spanish fine yet speaking it remains a challenge. On Sunday evening after my shift I decided to reopen the Spanish course on the app Busuu––one which I used for Spanish before my March 2023 trip to the Renaissance Society of America’s annual meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico––and try it out again.[1] That time I got through the A1 level before life got in the way, and I gave it up feeling frustrated with the process. I did not resume any online Spanish courses before my trip to Mexico last November for the History of Science Society meeting in Mérida, instead choosing the less preparatory method of winging it.[2] That worked with fits and spurts, my best Spanish conversations were in taxis with locals, though I was mostly thinking about how I would say things in French and then Hispanifying them based on my minimal knowledge of Spanish grammar. On Sunday, after I retired for the evening from my Spanish lessons on the app I realized what it was I missed so much in these apps: the human connection. Busuu prides itself on its crowd-sourced learning method; throughout the course learners are asked to submit spoken or written answers to the computer’s prompts which learners of other languages who speak the target language then correct. I like this system overall, and it does give this sense of community, yet I feel that it could go further.

After English, the second language I learned was Irish, my ancestral language. I started studying the Irish language when I was fourteen and have been focused on it to varying degrees for the last eighteen years. It really took until 2022 for me to connect with the language though, in spite of the fitful starts and stops because in that year I began to build a community around the Irish language. First on Zoom through Gaelchultúr, an Irish language school in Dublin, I met other speakers from across North America and beyond who like me were descendants of Irish immigrants old and new. I looked forward to seeing some of the same people term after term. Yet after returning to Kansas City, I began to look locally for Irish classes and came across the community that my friend Erin Hartnett has built at the Kansas City Irish Center. Through Erin I’ve met some really good friends and from our mutual appreciation for our ancestral language we’ve found a lot more in common from mutual histories to mutual appreciations for rugby. Without this community I would speak Irish but not terribly well. Now, not only do I speak Irish daily, but I also write in Irish every day. It has truly surpassed French as my second language, something I’m proud of yet not too concerned about when it comes to my Francophonic abilities.

French exists in a different sort of place for me than Irish. It’s not an ancestral language with deep family ties. Rather, it’s a language that I gravitated toward out of a fascination with French culture and history. I may have written here in the Wednesday Blog before that my first exposure to French came at sunset on a Sunday in February 2001 when my Mom put a “Learn French” cassette tape into the tape player in our family car when we were driving through the hills of northwestern Illinois toward Dubuque, Iowa. She and I were preparing for a trip to London and Paris that summer, the first European trip that I could remember, and she wanted to put in the effort for us to have some French before we arrived on the Eurostar from Waterloo Station at Paris-Gare du Nord. I didn’t like Paris much on that first visit, I found the language barrier to be too great for me to really feel a sense of connection with the place. On my next visit to France in March 2016 with three years of undergraduate French under my belt I found that I not only got the place more, but I appreciated the nuances of French culture more than I had as a child.

I owe a great deal to my undergraduate French professors M. Kathleen Madigan and Claudine Evans. It’s through their classes that I gravitated toward my career studying the French Renaissance. When I get asked why I chose to study the French I keep it simple and say it was a matter of pure convenience: I already spoke French, so I wouldn’t need to learn a new language (Spanish or Portuguese) to read my primary sources. That’s how I ended up studying André Thevet (1516–1590). I chose him because he happened to write about a sloth and for me the idea of being a sloth historian made me laugh. It’s as simple as that. I loved studying French in college, and even more teaching it with the online Beginner French course I built for the Barstow School in 2023 and 2024. I found that going through the same textbook I used a decade before I was not only teaching the students who in the future would go through my course, I was also renewing my own French education and learning things that I’d missed on my first go around. This is a critical point in language acquisition: few people are going to get a language on their first try, it’ll take multiple goes to understand what’s being said and to make oneself heard as well. It took me three tries to get Irish down, and the same is the case for Latin. Failure in the moment is merely a setback which can, and ought to be overcome in future endeavors. After all, remember that if we’re paying attention to our lives we’ll learn from our experiences.

I grew to really embrace a lot about the Francophonie to the point of paying Sling TV for access to TV5 Monde, France’s global TV channel which now broadcasts several different channels. I personally enjoy TV5 Monde Style, which tends to broadcast documentaries and cooking shows, though I don’t watch it as much as I might like. I read a lot of French books for my research, after all I work with source material that has largely only been written about in French and to a lesser extent in Portuguese. I am able to do what I do with those sources because I can read them and the secondary literature about them in French. All this made it all the easier for me to go to France and Belgium in the last several years and be able to switch from English to French as soon as I walked off the plane. I found when I was flying back to the United States in June 2024 after spending about a week speaking mostly French in Paris that I was consistently responding with the quick phrases “please, thank you, you’re welcome,” and the like bilingually with the French followed by the English as I’d heard so many people do in shops and the museums during that visit. It took me a while to get past doing this and just say things in English again after I returned.This then is why I think I’ve had so much trouble with learning Spanish. It’s the first language that I’ve given a big effort to learning outside of a classroom on my own. At least in the classroom you have fellow students around you to practice with. When you’re on your own you’re on your own, a wise-sounding craic which is to say that when alone you have no one else to talk with. I have friends here in Kansas City who speak Spanish, and I know all I have to do is ask, yet it’s finding the free time to sit down with them and work on it that I need to figure out. To truly gain a footing in a language one needs to immerse oneself in the culture. Apps and online learning will only take you so far. A classroom learner will blend into their own classroom idiolect of the language in that particular space where it exists in their life. Only if they move beyond classroom and begin to converse and live with people in places where that language is spoken will they begin to speak it in a manner which is more recognizable to native speakers.

[1] “A Letter from San Juan,” Wednesday Blog 3.29.

[2] “The North American Tour,” Wednesday Blog 5.34.

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog
A landline telephone in a classroom.

Electronic Signals

Electronic Signals – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

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
Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

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.

~

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.

[1] Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England, (Cornell University Press, 2019), 13.

[2] Fudge, 17.

[3] Thevet, Singularitez (Antwerp, 1558), 99r.

[4] Thevet, Singularitez (Antwerp, 1558), 99v–98r.

[5] Thevet, Singularitez (Antwerp, 1558), 99v.

[6] Thevet, Singularitez (Antwerp, 1558), 98r.

[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 Ecology 47 (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.

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

A frame from Abraham Ortellius's map of the Americas, 1587.

On Toponymy

On Toponymy – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

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
Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

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.
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!”

An engraving from a 16th century book of indigenous Brazilians cutting down trees for their timber.
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.

[2] Thevet, Singularitez, f. 132v.

[3] Thevet, Cosmographie Universelle, vol. 2, 22.8, f. 972a.

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

On Translation

On Translation – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

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
Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

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 Singularitez de 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.

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

On Technology

On Technology – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

Last week, I returned to Chicago, this time on a business trip to attend a conference, and on the way took time to slow things down and enjoy the lived experience. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

Last week, I returned to Chicago, this time on a business trip to attend a conference, and on the way took time to slow things down and enjoy the lived experience.

On Wednesday last week I boarded Amtrak’s Southwest Chief at Kansas City Union Station bound for Chicago. This visit to the metropolis of my birth was less for family affairs and instead for business. I spoke on Friday at the Renaissance Society of America’s conference at the Palmer House Hotel about how toucans were seen by sixteenth-century French merchants as economic commodities first and foremost. It was an unusual topic, but one that fluttered enough feathers in the organizers to earn me a travel grant from the RSA and a matching grant from my own History Department back in Binghamton to cover about half of my overall expenses for the trip.

In recent months, as I’ve had this trip and all the other ones planned in 2024 in mind, I’ve found myself growing evermore tired of being in constant contact with people near and far. Our technology allows us to make wonders, and to inspire ourselves to newer and greater heights with those wonders, yet I’ve found myself asking more lately how much we really ought to rely entirely on our technology? Every so often throughout the year I will find myself with a physical book, whether a paperback or a hardcover, that seems appealing, and I’ll stop and read. I used to read constantly. 

When I was in elementary school my grandparents gave me their 1979 World Book Encyclopedia set that had gone through several moves with them over the years. That year, feeling the effects of insomnia for the first time that I can remember in my life, I often stayed up late in my room reading these encyclopedia volumes. My parents eventually gave that set away, admittedly now the knowledge contained in them is 45 years out of date, it still showed Jimmy Carter as the sitting President, yet I remain forever grateful for that gift in all its thousands of pages. I can still remember the smell of those books in particular, and the charming and sometimes funny black-and-white pictures they contained.

Later, when I was in middle school I read several large and complex books in a row, including Thomas Kinsella’s translation of the Táin Bó Cúailnge, an Irish epic set 2,000 years ago, and Frank Delaney’s book Ireland: A Novel, which my Dad bought for me at a Hudson’s in O’Hare on the way back from another trip up to Chicago to see family during my eighth grade year. Perhaps the last of these memories of endless hours reading for fun was in preparation for the release of the last Harry Potter book, the Deathly Hallows, when I read the other 6 books in 3 days.

All of this changed when I started high school. I chose St. James Academy for two main reasons: they offered Latin as a foreign language, and they offered MacBooks for all of their students. With easier internet access than ever before and the creation of YouTube around that time, I found myself hooked reading more things online and watching videos. Today, I’m often more likely to open YouTube on my computer during some downtime than I am to pull up a book on my phone. I’ve gone through waves of enjoying reading books on my phone here and there, yet these are again just waves.

I spoke to my friend, Carmelita Bahamonde, who I’ve known now for over a decade since we met as undergraduates at Rockhurst University. She gives up her social media accounts every year for Lent, and now during Holy Week is nearing the end of that technological fast for its 2024 occurrence. 

Seán: “I worry that because it’s how I connect with so many people professionally, and cousins in Europe and across the United States, that it’ll minimize how much I’m in touch with them.”

Carmelita: “Yeah, I do, and I do take time off during Lent, yet I take it further, so the longest I’ve gone was to the end of June and start of July. It’s hard to keep that up.”

Seán: “June or July! That’s a long time to keep that up.”

Carmelita: “Yeah, the first time I did it I think I made it through May, and I came back for my Masters, and I decided this was something to come back for.”

So, when I saw that I could afford to purchase roundtrip sleeper tickets on the Southwest Chief for this trip, I jumped at the opportunity to not only enjoy the best that Amtrak’s western services have to offer, but to also enjoy 7 hours of disconnection from my technology. I spent those 7 hours reading Megan Kate Nelson’s book Saving Yellowstone about the first federal expeditions to the Yellowstone Basin, the building of the Northern Pacific Railroad, the decline of the Lakota’s autonomy, and the foundation of Yellowstone National Park. I brought two other books, three magazines, and all the books downloaded on my phone with me on this trip, figuring I’d have a fair bit of time to read. (On the return trip, rather than reading the materials I brought with me I ended up reading a book I bought in Chicago at the Field Museum’s bookstore by Jay Kirk called Kingdom Under Glass: A Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man’s Quest to Preserve the World’s Great Animalsabout Carl Akelely, the first Taxidermist-in-Chief at the Field Museum. I’m going off script here to say how wonderful it is.)

Seán: “And, I know people who have very full and happy and lovely lives and they’re not on social media, so it’s not necessary to be on it. Yet, it seems that’s how people connect nowadays, right?”

Carmelita: “Yeah, though I only post happy, lovely things, even when I’m at my lowest. So, I always see that so and so is travelling, and man I’m falling behind this year. Yet I wonder how much over time they’ve been doing this year that they can do that?”

Beyond even disconnecting to read, I feel a pull towards stepping back a bit from my complete adoption of all of this technology. I see myself looking more at the screens before me than at the world around me. A friend recently pointed me toward a book which considers that the decline in recreational bowling leagues in this country can be tied to an overall decline in a communal spirit and a deconstruction of our bonds of trust, which have contributed to the current sense of mass isolation, fear, and mistrust which have contributed in turn toward our present political paradigm. I haven’t read this book yet, to be clear, yet I see how the premise works. I love coming to conferences like the RSA to experience the community that these events foster. There are people here who I met last Fall at the Sixteenth Century Society Conference in Baltimore or last March at the 2023 RSA in Puerto Rico. I’ve had the opportunity to tell people here how much I appreciate their work, and to talk a bit about my own, to hear the affirmations that I so often miss in my daily life about the actual research I do.

Carmelita: “Yeah, you have both positives and negatives, you get to connect with family and peers who are far away, yet you also can lose yourself in our technology.”

We could certainly meet remotely using our technology to foster connections, yet those bonds would be far less strong than they are now that we’ve met and know some more about each other. Our technology allows us to instantaneously talk with people whole continents and oceans away, even to the astronauts orbiting our planet on the International Space Station. It has allowed us to even communicate with our furthest satellites that have reached far beyond where any human has gone before. Yet those connections are proxies for the real, physical connections we inherently desire by our basic evolutionary biology. I have trouble sometimes overcoming my own shyness in public settings, I certainly felt that at certain points on this trip, at times I’ve found conferences unbearable because I don’t feel up to talking to people I don’t already know, even when I’ve read and enjoyed their work. I do feel I would be more comfortable in these situations if I were less technologically connected and more connected to the human.

Seán: “What are some alternatives to social media that you’ve found useful?”

Carmelita: “I still have [Facebook] Messenger on my phone, so I use that to stay in touch with people. I sent a message this year to my friend in the Netherlands to say ‘Hey, just to let you know I’m taking my yearly break from social media,’ and she said ‘hey, no problem,’ and she’ll continuously text me and send me things, and my parents will show me things on social media if they’re really necessary. The people who, like you, really want to stay in touch will do so, and I really appreciate that.”

Seán: “It speaks to Robin Dunbar, who’s a primatologist and sociologist, who wrote about this idea called Dunbar’s number where there’s this maximum number that a human can have in their social circles, and I think it really speaks to that culling of that number. I’ve probably got 1700 friends on Facebook, and excluding family which is 30-40 people, there might be 10 people who I stay in touch with, and you’re one of them.”

Carmelita: “Yeah, and you are too. And I’ve actually had people reach out to me in the past and say ‘Hey, I haven’t seen anything from you, are you actually alive?’ and I’ll reply, ‘Hey, yeah I’m actually kind of better!'” (laughs)

My roomette on the Southwest Chief on the way up to Chicago.

I admire my friends and family who can give up some of this technology for extended periods of time. There are things to appreciate about the connectedness our technology provides to be sure, I appreciate seeing the social media posts of those who I care most deeply about, yet within that outer circle there are the few who I see on a daily basis, and I wonder how much I really pay attention to them, or them to me, with these screens in front of us all the time?

It strikes me that more often than not, when I’m mindlessly scrolling through YouTube on a given evening at home, I’m often finding the same music as I had the evening before, listening to the same songs or variations of those songs over and over again. Those songs evoke certain emotions for me, emotions tied to dreams and memories both. Yet I ought to really be focused on the people around me, for as much as our creations may have achieved a sense of immortality with their technological life spans far outpacing our own, those whom I love will only be with me for so long.

Carmelita: “It feels like if you didn’t post it, it didn’t happen; and so last year I went on a family trip, and at the end of the year I didn’t have any pictures and it feels like it didn’t happen, so that’s why I appreciate my social media. Yet like you said earlier today, you don’t have to post everything.”

There ought to be a balance between connection and relief, between all our noise and the silence, which is an acquired taste to be sure, yet is beautiful in its own way. I appreciate the assistance that my technology can provide in my work; it is far easier to do my research using PDF copies of these sixteenth-century books than having to rely on quickly written notes made during a rare research trip to a distant library. When I did my first research trip as an undergrad in 2013 to the Library of Congress, I actually took handwritten notes of the books I read. I quickly realized it was far more efficient to take notes by computer, to type things out at 70 words per minute than to write them by hand in my elegant if at times slow cursive script. This has meant that in the 11 years since I’ve found myself writing by hand less and less, even perhaps risking the loss of the art of penmanship, and calligraphy (if I may be bold to call it that).

Seán: “What’s the underlying purpose of posting? Is it self-gratification, is it to say ‘look what I did!’ is it say ‘look at how cool I am,’ or something like that? I always try to think of the underlying reasons for what I do.”

Carmelita: “I once had a friend who asked me why I post everything, and I said ‘well, I wanted to post pictures of this trip,’ and I think it’s a good way to show what I’m doing to more distant family who I haven’t seen in twenty years. I do sometimes wonder, ‘is this for showing off?’ I don’t like to post things that are show-offy. Several years ago, I got a promotion at work and I wanted to post about it but I sat on it for a while and ended up deleting it because I can’t brag, and so it is a double-edged sword, because you don’t want to brag but you should at the same time. It comes down to perspective: who do you want to know about your successes? Graduating from my Masters, I wanted everyone to know, ‘hey, look I worked my butt off!’ but a trip to Disney isn’t something for everyone to see.”

Let me close with this: I could have all the efficiency in the world with my computer and smart watch and smart phone and voice-activation software in my car and my headphones that connect wirelessly to my other devices so I can talk and take notes on my phone at the same time. I can learn so much from watching all the videos anyone has ever made on a subject and imagine wonders I might never otherwise consider with the invention of film, television, and the videos we upload to the internet. Yet none of it is as rewarding or as joyous as seeing a friend smile, and feeling the warmth of our interaction in that one specific moment in which we are living. Perhaps we need a little more of our human nature in our lives after all.

Seán: “Let me ask you one final question and then we’ll get back to lunch here, this meatball sandwich is giving me a look: do you think technology makes us more or less human? If you think about how we originally evolved in our nature as humans, as Homo sapiens, as wise people, as learned people, and yet do our creations diminish our base humanity if we’re too focused on them?”

Carmelita: “I think it depends on what you post on social media and if you’re fake about them. We talk about influencers who post amazing photos but are broke because of it, then it’s not worth it. Social media allows us to stay connected, and that’s a wonderful thing. So, as long as you’re being true to yourself then that’s the key.”

Seán: “Excellent, I like the connection between philosophy and real life there.”

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog
Finally, for your viewing pleasure my view facing north crossing the Mississippi at Ft. Madison, Iowa.

Correction

Corrected on 28 March 2024 to reflect the correct spelling of Carl Akeley’s name. I’ve misread it now for 31 years as Akerely.

A Letter from San Juan

A Letter from San Juan – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This past week I was in San Juan, Puerto Rico for the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America. Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

Puerto Rico is an island caught between two waves, one originating in Spain and radiating throughout the Americas, the other originating in the United States whose influence is out of place here yet established enough to be present beneath the surface. I was uncertain what I’d find here amid the palm trees and verdant greenery, the bustling streets and amid the lives of 3 million people who have seen tremendous troubles over the recent past. After a week here I’m still unsure of some questions I came to this island pondering: what would be best situation for the Puerto Ricans themselves, what is it that they generally want of their relationship with the United States, and how can I, an Estadounidese, contribute positively to answering these questions?

It is strange for me spending time in a place like Puerto Rico. I’m familiar with travelling overseas, leaving the comforts of my Midwestern home for distant shores in Europe, but this week was my first spent in Latin America. What’s more, this was also my first time traveling to one of the US territories that are a part of the United States but lack full representation within our federal government. On Saturday, I texted my friend the political journalist Luis Eduardo Martinez that it was strange for me, an Irish American, to be the colonizer in someone else’s homeland when the most central tenant of our Irish American culture and identity is that we are the descendants of exiles who sought refuge from British colonialism in our own ancestral homeland. I felt uncomfortable in San Juan knowing that while I was in the United States, I was still a guest whose presence was perhaps not entirely welcomed considering that the American conquest of Puerto Rico in 1898 came at a moment when arguments for Puerto Rican independence from Spain were growing and quite outspoken.

At the end of the day this question of whether Puerto Rico’s status as a Commonwealth, or Free Associated State in Spanish, of the United States among its territories should change, either towards independence or towards statehood must be decided by the Puerto Ricans themselves. All we in the 50 states can and should do is encourage that decision be undertaken democratically, so it reflects the will of the Puerto Rican people and not just their leaders. I’ve been a bit more glass-half-empty of late, so while I was here on a working vacation, I still found these questions weighing on my thoughts for much of the trip.

When I learned the Renaissance Society of America would be meeting in San Juan this March, I invited my parents to come along with me. We were also joined by one of my best friends from Binghamton, the Italian historian of Italian-Ottoman trade relations in the Adriatic, Marco Alì Spadaccini, who joined us a few days later. Initially we were going to stay in a Marriott property within walking distance of the conference location, the Caribe Hilton, but in between the initial planning and when things finally were booked at Christmas, rooms at that hotel were quite a bit more expensive. So, I ended up finding a couple places on AirBnB around the Caribe Hilton in Santurce and Old San Juan and proposed each of them to my parents and Marco. The one we picked, a large apartment on Calle de San Francisco near la Fortaleza, the governor’s palace in the heart of Old San Juan turned out to be a wonderful decision. I’m writing this now listening to the tropical birds chirping away as the Sun sets on our final evening here in San Juan, in a fine old, terraced room with a balcony looking out over the street, palm trees in view, street cats prowling below.

San Juan is not the oldest city I’ve spent time in by far; when they were building my basement flat on the edge of the old walled City of London, they found a Roman grave dating to the start of the second century CE. Still, it is the oldest city on this side of the Atlantic that I’ve yet visited. At the time of writing this I haven’t left the Islet of San Juan in nearly a week, and if I lived here, I probably could spend most of my life on this islet here in the old city. It is a beautiful place with vibrant buildings painted many colors and blue cobblestone streets that tend to be run by pedestrians more than drivers, unlike our Midwestern cities, San Juan was built at a time before cars when we were all still pedestrians. The sound of joyous music ringing from bars and restaurants in the evenings did a great deal to cheer me up.

Old San Juan’s history is one of the great draws for me. It makes sense that the Renaissance Society of America would hold their conference in a city such as this that was built during the Renaissance. Names that I’ve known for as long as I can remember like Ponce de Leon come to life in this city, where he and his family built their home, the Casa Blanca on a hill just to the north of where I stayed along the western edge of the city walls. To the north of Casa Blanca stand the mighty fortresses of San Felipe el Morro and San Cristóbal who guarded San Juan for centuries from attackers sailing into Puerto Rican waters from the open Atlantic to the northeast. El Morro is impressive in the sheer scale of its battlements, which reminded me of some of the citadels that Vauban built for Louis XIV in France that I’ve visited in Besançon and Lille, and of Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain in Upstate New York. San Cristóbal is a younger fort, its construction largely took place between 1766 and 1783 under the supervision of a couple of Irish nobles exiled into Spanish service named Alejandro O’Reilly and Tomás O’Daly. Still, San Cristóbal is impressive in its scale and in its continued use by the Spanish Army and later the US Army through the Second World War.

Of all the things I’ve done in the last week here in Old San Juan perhaps my favorite has been simply wandering this city’s streets, seeing both the busy shops and restaurants, walking by local places crowded with Puerto Ricans cheering on their team in the World Baseball Classic, yet even more wonderful were my wanderings down Calle del Sol, Calle de la Luna, and around the Casa Blanca along the old city’s residential streets. I often find myself thinking when I travel about whether I could live in the place I’m visiting. In general, as much as I’ve enjoyed this week in San Juan, I’m not sure it would be a place where I could settle down full time. Yet walking along these residential streets I did find the idea becoming more appealing. Still, while I hear it’s going to be quite cold this week in Kansas City, I am looking forward to getting back home.

¡Gracias, mis amigos sanjuaneros!

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog
Click Here to View More Pictures from the Trip