University Of Delaware

By Author: Shirley Green
Total Articles: 129
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This is a stimulating collection of interdisciplinary essays exploring some of the ways in which early modern European identities are fashioned by their encounters with borders. As the title of Betteridge's editorial preamble 'Borders, Travel and Writing' suggests, this book takes a particularly diverse view of overseas and inland journeying: 'In early modern Europe' he observes,' crossing a border could take many forms. It could mean sailing to the Americas, visiting a Links London hospital or taking a trip through London's sewage system'. Yet, these multifarious notions have been marshalled into a lucid project.

Montaigne's essay 'examines and interrogates the border between civilized and barbarian'. By contrast, the fictional Utopia,' "Nowhere"... celebrates the borderless world of European humanism while at the same time in its details reflecting the humanist desire for borders, for order and control'. These sixteenth-century texts provide examples of the period's complex approach to the topic whilst enabling the editor to establish the book's organizing principles. Betteridge ...
... sees two of the collection's essays as pivotal. Neil Whitehead's 'Sacred Cannibals and Golden Kings: Travelling the Borders of the New World with Hans Staden and Walter Ralegh' and Maria R. Boes's 'Unwanted Travellers: The Tightening of City Borders in Early Modern Germany' take up and develop the foregoing discussion of Montaigne and More in important ways. In the words of the editor, Whitehead's piece 'is the theoretical heart of the collection'. In his study of Ralegh's Discoverie of Guiana (1596) and Staden's Warhaftige Historia (1557), Whitehead adroitly discusses the manner in which both travelers 'encountered native cultural and political borders which needed to be negotiated and could not be simply overridden'. The 'lure of gold at the borders of colonial possessions', compelled travelers like Ralegh to cross borders 'for the politics of state'. The figure of seeming alterity which lurked on the margins of these opulent sites the cannibal is Links Of London Charms scrutinized in Staden's account of his capture by (and eventual escape from) the Tupinamba. With an introduction written by the anatomist Johannes Dryander, Staden's record of the Tupi Indians' rituals foregrounds the threatening carnivalesque aspects of Tupian sacrifice which violated 'European social and cultural norms'. A sentence from a footnote in Whitehead's essay comments that 'Through the social order of power, our bodies are shaped, and defined'. To be sure, the dense, interrelated set of European discourses that inscribe the cannibal (including religion, punishment and dissection) as other are clearly exposed in Staden's text.

Boes's piece, described by Betteridge as 'the central chapter' which 'shows in great detail the way in which a specific central European city responded to the humanist reform programme by creating numerous new borders and controls', explains the means by which borders mark bodies as outcasts. Taking the 'free imperial city of Frankfurt' as a case study, Boes convincingly shows, for instance, how 'Even the city wall... Once the symbol of urban medieval liberties, increasingly served as a border-enhancing discriminatory weapon', setting 'insiders against outsiders': Jews, Gypsies, the poor and unmarried women.