Ester Nelly Abuter Ananías - Fachbereich Philosophie und ...

Kathryn Mayers ( Wake Forest University, Romance Languages, Winston-Salem,
North Carolina, u sa )
Truth and History in Columbus’s Carta a Santángel and Léry’s Histoire d’un
voyage
In this paper, I propose to re-examine the controversial historical value of two
narratives of travel between Europe and America : the Carta a Santángel by
Christopher Columbus and Histoire d’un voyage by Jean de Léry. In particular, I
am interested in the type of history created and the type of truth told when these
two Early Modern European explorers translate their discoveries of America into
European historiographical modes. While Columbus’s exaggerations and Léry’s
Huguenot biases have, for centuries, led scholars to question the truth-value of their
accounts, recent theoretical developments in cultural studies have further reinforced
this skepticism by revealing that, like writers of literature, historians approach their
evidence with a sense of the possible forms diff erent kinds of human situations can
take and that, like in literature, these forms play a role in ordering the “facts” of
historical narratives. Such theories reduce the historical value of narratives such
as Columbus’s and Léry’s to records of their authors’ largely unconscious eff orts
to mediate between alternative, transhistorical modes of emplotment. However,
the Carta and the Histoire present ample evidence that their authors’ choice of
historiographical mode—not to mention their exaggerations—arise not from
unconscious or collective ideological beliefs, but rather, from conscious and concrete
political, social, and economic factors. In this paper, I would like to explore the
historical value of these texts as records of the social and dialogic pressures of their
times—as records of confl icts that wracked Europe at the time these texts were
writt en.
Email mayerskm@wfu.edu
Section Travels Between Europe and Latin America ( 15th through 21st centuries )
Panel 2
Date July 28
Time 9 :00
Location l 116