Tag Archives: Tupinambá

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.

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A portrait of André Thevet from 1554

Why André Thevet?

Why André Thevet? – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

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
Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

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.
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.
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
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. –

Priez Dieu pour luy.[3]

In English, this translates as :

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.

[2] Thevet, Cosmographie Universelle, Vol. 2, 21.2, ff. 908v–909r.

[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.

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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
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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.

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