Cannibals, Christians, and the Anthropological Imagination: Montaigne and His Contemporaries

Columbus never realized he was in a New World, but the Caribbean presented him with strikingly new cultures where one of his Arawak informants confirmed to him that the Caribs [or “Canibs”] were anthropophages – eaters of human flesh. Over the next few centuries cannibalism would become one of the defining traits or representations of the “barbarism” of many of the peoples of the New World and, therefore, of the presumed superiority of European cultures as they took possession of the recently discovered continents. Yet the great French humanist Michel de Montaigne famously questioned this claim to cultural superiority in his Essays (1580). Martin’s talk will explore Montaigne’s critique of his European contemporaries within the broader context of the fashioning of an early modern ethnography of the cannibal through the writings of a number of French, Spanish, Portuguese, and German travelers to the New World. Real or imagined, the European encounter with cannibalism played a major role in the shaping of what we might call the anthropological imagination of early modern Europe. 

John Jeffries Martin, chair of the department of history at Duke University, is the author of Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (1993) and Myths of Renaissance Individualism (2004). This year, he is a visiting scholar at Venice International University, where he hopes to complete a new book Crossing the Pillars of Hercules: Europe’s First Modernity, 1492-1789, a work that explores real and imagined “crossings” in the reshaping of European culture in these centuries. Martin also has a keen interest in the history of torture, a topic he is pursuing through a study of Francesco Casoni, a provincial intellectual, whose writings on evidence and the art of conjecture did much to undermine the need for the use of torture in the courts of Europe in the early modern period. Currently Martin serves on the board of editors of the American Historical Review and is, with Richard Newhauser, editor of the series Vices & Virtues for Yale University Press.