A Taste for the Foreign examines foreignness as a crucial aesthetic category for the development of prose fiction from Jacques Amyot’s 1547 translation of The Ethiopian Story to Antoine Galland’s early eighteenth-century version of The Thousand and One Nights. While fantastic storylines and elements of magic were increasingly shunned by a neo-classicist literary culture that valued verisimilitude above all else, writers and critics surmised that the depiction of exotic lands could offer a superior source for the novelty, variety, and marvelousness that constituted fiction’s appeal. In this sense, early modern fiction presents itself as privileged site for thinking through the literary and cultural stakes of exoticism, or the taste for the foreign. Long before the term exoticism came into common parlance in France, fiction writers thus demonstrated their understanding of the special kinds of aesthetic pleasure produced by evocations of foreignness, developing techniques to simulate those delights through imitations of the exotic. As early modern readers eagerly consumed travel narratives, maps, and international newsletters, novelists discovered ways to blur the distinction between true and imaginary representations of the foreign, tantalizing readers with an illusion of learning about the faraway lands that captured their imaginations.

This book analyzes the creative appropriations of those scientific or documentary forms of writing that claimed to inform the French public about exotic places. Concentrating on the most successful examples of some of the most important sub-genres of prose fiction in the long seventeenth century—heroic romances, shorter urban novels, fictional memoirs, and extraordinary voyages—the book examines how these types of fiction creatively appropriate the scientific or documentary forms of writing that claimed to inform the French public about exotic places.

This translation of an eyewitness account by a major participant offers valuable information about all three attempts to establish a French colony on the south Atlantic coast of North America.

Rene Laudonniere's account of the three attempts by France to colonize what is now the United States is uniquely valuable because
he played a major role in each of the ventures—first, in 1562, as second in command during the founding of the ill-fated Charlesport, then as commander for the establishment of Fort Caroline on Florida's St. Johns River in 1564, and finally as the one to welcome French reinforcements the following year. It was also Laudonniere's destiny to witness the tragic fall of Fort Caroline to Spanish claims one month later.

Laudonniere wrote his chronicle, L'histoire Notable de la Floride, in 1565 following the fall of Fort Caroline as he recuperated in England. Much more than an account of his feelings and adventures, Laudonniere's history reveals him to be an exceedingly able and accurate geographer with a highly developed interest in anthropology.

The first English translation was published by Richard Hakluyt in 1587. Charles E. Bennett's graceful and accurate rendering in modern English was first published in 1975 by the University Press of Florida. Besides the account, thoroughly annotated and with present-day names identifying sites visited by the Frenchman, this volume includes a valuable introductory essay. The appendices to the volume are four noteworthy documents, the last of which—a guide to plants of 16th-century Florida—will be of exceptional interest to naturalists, gardeners, and students of folklore. The account itself will fascinate professional historians and anthropologists as well as general readers interested in the exciting and often moving
events of early European settlement in the New World.

Rene Laudonniere was a French adventurer and explorer of the 16th century who wrote L'histoire Notable de la Floride. Charles E. Bennett is a historian and former Florida congressman. He was coauthor of the Moss-Bennett legislation and was instrumental in the establishment of the Fort Caroline National Memorial and the Timucuan Ecological and Historical Preserve. Jerald T. Milanich is Curator in Archaeology at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

This book proposes that in a number of French Renaissance texts, produced in varying contexts and genres, we observe a shift in thinking about memory and forgetting. Focusing on a corpus of texts by Marguerite de Navarre, Pierre de Ronsard, and Michel de Montaigne, it explores several parallel transformations of and challenges to traditional discourses on the human faculty of memory.

Throughout Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages, a number of influential authors described memory as a powerful tool used to engage important human concerns such as spirituality, knowledge, politics, and ethics. This tradition had great esteem for memory and made great efforts to cultivate it in their pedagogical programs. In the early sixteenth century, this attitude toward memory started to be widely questioned. The invention of the printing press and the early stages of the scientific revolution changed the intellectual landscape in ways that would make memory less important in intellectual endeavors. Sixteenth-century writers began to question the reliability and stability of memory. They became wary of this mental faculty, which they portrayed as stubbornly independent, mysterious, unruly, and uncontrollable–an attitude that became the norm in modern Western thought as is illustrated by the works of Descartes, Locke, Freud, Proust, Foucault, and Nora, for example.

Writing in this new intellectual landscape, Marguerite de Navarre, Ronsard, and Montaigne describe memory not as a powerful tool of the intellect but rather as an uncontrollable mental faculty that mirrored the uncertainty of human life. Their characterization of memory emerges from an engagement with a number of traditional ideas about memory. Notwithstanding the great many differences in concerns of these writers and in the nature of their texts, they react against or transform their classical and medieval models in similar ways. They focus on memory’s unruly side, the ways that memory functions independently of the will. They associate memory with the fluctuations of the body (the organic soul) rather than the stability of the mind (the intellectual soul). In their descriptions of memory, these authors both reflect and contribute to a modern understanding of and attitude towards this mental faculty.