Comparative Interest In The New World example essay topic

The discovery of the Americas in 1492 was a massive challenge to the accepted notions of the world; a world which was still viewed by many in Ptolemaic terms, and laid claims against the accepted wisdom concerning geography, theology, history and the very nature of man. However, despite the momentous implications of a new land and, more importantly, its heathen peoples, there was an apparent slowness to take any real notice of the New World from within the Old World. This lag cannot be explained either by slow dissemination of the news, nor by a lack of understanding of the importance of the discovery. Peter Martyr wrote to the Count of Tend illa and the Archbishop of Grenada in September 1493 to spread the news, opening with the words Raise your spirits Hear about the new discovery! He talked of the gold Columbus found as well as the important news of the men they found, who were naked yet fought with bows and staves; men who had kings competing for power and yet worshipped celestial bodies. The excitement of the initial news was tremendous, and this was reflected in the demand for literature concerning the new discovery.

Columbus first letter concerning his discovery was reprinted 9 times by the end of 1493 and at least 20 times by 1500. Montalboddos voyages went into print 15 times by 1507 and even in the mid sixteenth century, Ramusis voyages were being republished. Yet the excitement of discovery was not the only reason for the excitement. The scale of the discovery was well-recognised. Guicciardini praises the Spanish and Portuguese for the great and unexpected discovery. Juan Luis Virus wrote that the globe has been opened up to the human race and in 1539 the Padua n philosopher Buona mic claimed that the Americas and the printing press were the two great historical events that could be compared not only to antiquity, but to immortality.

With the obvious exceptions of the Incarnation, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, Gomara viewed the event as the greatest since the creation of the world. Although Gomara was writing a half-century after the discovery, and apparently with great enthusiasm, the fad for Americana soon passed. Although Guicciardini praised the Spanish and Portuguese for their discovery, he did not seem aware of Columbus Italian nationality. When the worlds most famous sailor died in Valladolid, the local chronicle did not even mention the event. Whilst Ramusio and Oviedo reckoned that his discovery conversion ary potential would give him almost saintly status, it was some time before Columbus could even have been sure that his Christian name would be recorded correctly by writers.

Benoni noted that their classical forebears would have erected a statue in his honour suggesting a lack of appropriate monuments to his memory (although Francis Bacon kept a statue of him) and giving us a hint at a preoccupation with comparing contemporary society to the classical civilisations. The situation became so bad that in 1571 his son Hernando was forced to publish a biography simply in order to keep his name alive for another generation. There was certainly many difficulties for Europeans wanting to learn about America; difficulties which seem to have fostered apathy. Difficulties existed because of the sheer distance between the Americas and Europe and the time it took to cross the Atlantic, the problems of preconceptions and the difficulties of language and environment. These made any information at all difficult to obtain but these were all overcome simply by exposure to America and by using large fleets to maintain an American presence, which would explain initial apathy about America.

The news of discovery apart, people would not have been interested by reports with no further developments. Hernando Columbus was fighting a truly difficult battle, as the European reading public displayed no overwhelming interest in the newly-discovered world of America. [1] and it would take generations to overcome such barriers as the problems of observation, description, dissemination and comprehension. As Humboldt said, to see is not to observe; that is to compare and clarify. Unfortunately, the difficulty of comparing and clarifying a land totally separate in form, ecology, culture and humanity from ones own in words is incalculable. The problems of disseminating new ideas and images until they became the stock-and-trade furnishings of the mental images of the peoples of Europe concerning the Americas were enormous.

Yet more difficult was the problem of shifting the mental barriers of both the author, who needed to try and work to portray a world entirely different from his own, and the reader, who needed to change their perceptions without seeing the landscapes of which the author had the benefit when writing. So great was the problem that most authors chose to wrote of experiences as opposed to scenery. De Guzman specifically said in his prologue that he would not try to relate the sights that he had seen. Some people found themselves able to describe individual aspects of the American landscape; Verrazano described the forests of North America, de Very described the flora and fauna that he saw whilst Barlow e described the trees of North America is some detail. However, the greatest problem lay in describing the peoples of North America. The problem of the weightiness of the classical ideals often meant that the realities of the New World were hidden, minimised and concealed by bad comparisons that, instead of relating the differences and similarities between the Americas and Europe, simply served to trivialize the fundamental differences between the two zones.

For example, Perez de Olives History of the Discovery of the Indies contains a speech by an Aztec chieftain with Livia n rhetoric in it. Alonso de Zu azo looked at the Mexicans he met as chivalric barbarians, whilst Verrazano saw the Indians of Rhode Island as dark-haired, bronzed and black-eyed, but described their bodies in terms best suited to describing classical sculptures. The problem was to be tackled by the employment of painters, but European painters were not really used to making portraits of people outside of the classical mould. In any case, even when painters gave their etchers material to use, the poor etching technology often made any characteristics indistinguishable, and etchers often chose to turn their subjects into Greek and Roman ideals. Worse still, some publishers simply used images of Turks that they happened to have in stock at the time instead of commissioning new etchings. The lack of interest in the Americas is thus partly the result of a continuing determination, right up to the last two or three decades of the sixteenth century, to describe the world as if it were still the world as known to Strabo, Ptolemy and Pomponius Mela [2]; a tendency which made America sound like a simple extension of the European mainland and thus diminished its novelty and interest value.

This obsessive clinging onto the mighty past was driven forward by the printing press, which had turned to publishing classics almost immediately that it needed secular matter. The philosophy of Humanism, which predominated above all in Florence from the time of Petrarch until around 1475, had been originally dedicated above all else to the promulgation of classical languages and literature, which they thought to be more rational. Burckhard t noted that the Florentine's made antiquarian interests one of the chief objectives of their lives. What they referred to as studia humanitas was strongly centred on philology and it was this study that first discovered a definitive and impassable distance between past and present, whereas before, there had been no awareness of a break. This new awareness gave rise to a need to define oneself in relation to the past, to build anew on the past, but differently from the past.

The Romans, it was argued, had built their Republic on foundations of virtue, whilst their empire was on foundations of tyranny. The philosophy, a result of Florence republican fervour, could have developed in no other environment, and the defeat of the Visconti tyranny in Milan, was an exhibition from the most Republican of cities (the city had been founded by Sulla), and of its self-conscious study of the Roman republican world. Humanism was the frame into which the news of the discovery was placed; a frame of devotion to Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, Xenophon and the newly discovered Tacitus. Brunis second dialogue saw the classical past as something with which the newly disassociated present can compete and outdo, as opposed an irreplaceable lost golden age. In 1435, the exiled Roman Curia, which included Bruni, held a debate about whether the vernacular languages of Europe could ever attain the perfection of Latin or Greek, and concluded that one must be willing to employ the ancient model as a guide in building a new literature in a new nation, but that one must do it in a new language. This is indicative of the obsessive comparisons between the Early-Modern and Classical eras, that the Roman Curia should compare their languages; this is more bizarre still when one is dealing in the era after Dante, one of Brunis Three Crowns of Florence and a vernacular poet.

Dante was a recognised talent and he was defended to the hilt by Florentine Humanists even when his placement of Caesar in purgatory and his assassins in a lower circle of hell suggested sympathy with tyranny. That one should consider faulting Dante for his use of Italian and not High Latin suggests compulsiveness as regards the Classics. With European arrogance about what defined society (Europe), Bod in declined to use the information that he had available about the New World in his writings whilst cosmographers and social philosophers, with so much to take in, just decided to circumvent the problems caused by America by ignoring the continent. This is perhaps unsurprising given the responses of Medieval Christendom to Islam, where once again prejudice, puzzlement and indifference reigned. The reorganisation of ideas to incorporate the New World meant the abandonment of many of their inherited founding principles and preconceptions, so many chose to avoid making the agonising decision [3] to take on board the new lessons of the New World, especially when arguments concerning the Old World were so prevalent and complex. New World culture was never close to being assimilated, and no European would ever have considered any assimilation of anything non-European.

In 1528 Hernan Perez de O iva wrote of giving those strange lands the form of our own. The Aztec Empire was seen as the background to conversion, as the Roman Empire had been the background to European conversion. Las Casas Apologetic a Historia assessed Aztecs, Incas, Greeks, Romans, Gauls, Egyptians and Britons as examples of pre-Christian societies (and came up very much in favour of the potential of the South Americans) thus bringing the Indians into sociological parity with the Europeans, and Ciceros claim that men are defined by their rationality led many to see the Indians as equal; a decision made finally with a papal bull authenticating their humanity. Whilst theologians and philosophers were debating what makes men into men, Philip of Spain used Politics by Aristotle to justify the slave status of the Americans, whilst even Cortes called them Barbarians in spite of the condemnation in Corinthians I of the term Barbarians. Ciceros claim that men are rational also meant that the Europeans had no qualms about imposing a rational government onto the Americans, replacing their irrational lifestyles, again despite Corinthians I. This placement of Aristotle on a par with St. Paul is perhaps incredible from the grandson of Charles V, but indicative of the sway held by the classics outside of the republican sphere. In the decades after the fall of Constantinople and the establishment of fortress Europe, when the system of Tuerkeglocken warning bells ran from Vienna to Gibraltar to call the Christians to defend the east against Turkish intruders, the unbreakable Christian continent, under the Habsburg marshalship, was coming to be viewed as not just the cradle of civilisation, but also the divinely appointed centre of humanity.

The idea of accepting ideas from the New World where the inhabitants had not yet even acquired shame about their nakedness was preposterous to Europeans who knew themselves to be right in every way. This idea of divine guidance for the Godly continent was supported by the growth of the influence of the classic texts. The growth of printing lent greater authority to the classic texts and led to a more slavish interpretation of the classics. Authority staked fresh claims against experience as the lessons of the New World came to be seen as being incredible or at best, irrelevant. In an era when great, spiritual, intellectual and political problems [4] were rending the continent apart, the New World was not perceived as a land of hope, but as a potential cause of new problems, which may explain the dedication of those who chose to ignore it. In the seventh century, as J.H. Elliott notes, the Chinese Tang dynasty's discovery of Nam-Viet had a similar influence, as the mainland Chinese came to impose their will on the indigenous population, and decided not to take in the lessons that could be learnt there.

The influence of the classical past is clear in the approach taken to the histories made of the Americas. Using Pliny's Natural History as a guide, Monardas Medicinal Plants of America and de A costas Natural & Moral History of the Indies were the first books to catalogue and classify any aspects of the American world. The history was based on recordings of the oral traditions a source that was only credited with anything more than the most dubious of provenances once Herodotus usage of the oral tradition was cited as a precedent. The issue of whether Europeans were more interested by their heritage or by their own generations discovery is easier to answer by geographical region. Atkinson's survey of geographical literature shows four times as many books published in France concerning Africa and Asia as the Americas, although this may be symptomatic of the exploration of the Africa's and Asia by the Portuguese; a factor that led to geographical information being available for these regions which was unavailable for the Americas. However, this explanation does not explain an apparent waning in the rate of publication of books about the Americas throughout the period, before it finally plummeted in the last decades of the sixteenth century.

This would suggest a New World apathy in France; a country whose role in the discovery and exploration of the continent was minimal. Meanwhile, in Poland, 39 16th and 17th centuries volumes contain a total of 60 American references, all of which imply either the exotic, or the church triumphant; none implying anything more or anything more important to Europeans themselves, nor showing a knowledge of the Americas beyond the Americas as converted area and as a faraway source of gold. Comparative interest in the New World seems to vary with national involvement with the discovery and exploration. In Italy, interest was intense until the 1520's when Italian involvement ended and Italian sources ceased to be produced. The number of translations of foreign works did seem to make up this shortfall from the 1550's and is indicative of a prolonged interest from the Italians. The Italian epic poems of the 1580's and 1590's about the discovery and the 1614 Spanish drama, El Nuevo Mundo descubierto par Cristobal Colon by de Vega were the exceptions in so far as that they were focussed works concerning the New World, although it should be remembered that in these works, the Indians speak in tones more suited to a debate in a Roman forum than a South American rainforest.

Spain's public showed little interest in the New World, and Ercillas Aruacana was the first epic about the Indies. This may be because the conquistadors were not epic hero material, although a large corpus of professional materials, for use by doctors, philosophers, sailors and theologians was produced. This may have depreciated public appreciation for the New World, but the extent of Spanish interest in Portugal's great discovery becomes clear when looking at England. In England, the discovery was hailed with apathy before the Spanish connection of the 1550's stimulated a limited degree of interest.

Although it is tempting to see the Atlantic as the binding factor governing interest, the examples of England, France and Italy, where interest runs counter to this trend would suggest that the Atlantic presence was simply the stimulus to explore that led to involvement in the New World in the first place. On the issue of the role of the classical worlds hold on Europe, the rise of Humanism, Platonism and Neoplatonism, meant that the Old World had just risen to its climax of relevance as the New World was discovered and was on the wane. The increase in translations in Italy throughout the 1550's coincides with the end of the Neo platonic era, which would suggest a shift in focus at around this time. The coincidence of the Spanish connection in the 1550's and the end of Neoplatonism would explain the interest in England for the New World from this time. The increase in importance of the New World at the Spanish court grew massively at this time. The Spanish took just 300 toneladas of silver in 1504, 10,000 toneladas by 1520, 20,000 toneladas by 1545 and 32,355 toneladas by 1554.

The coincidence with the death of Neoplatonism would foster a look westward by the Spanish at this time. This is easiest to spot in the appearance of poetry, plays and so on, but also in the use of questionnaires in Castile; a technique honed in the New World. Thus, greater interest in the New World was reliant on dis entrenchment of the classical ideals that had been made fashionable by the successes in Italy of humanist Florence. [1] p. 12 THE [2] p. 14 [3] p. 15 [4] p. 16.