Strange Bedfellows: Turks, Gauls, and Amerindians in Lescarbot’s Histoire de la Nouvelle France

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • True, Micah

• This is the accepted version of the following article: True, Micah. “Strange Bedfellows: Turks, Gauls, and Amerindians in Lescarbot’s Histoire de la Nouvelle France.” French Review, vol. 87, no. 4, 2014, 139-151., which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1353/tfr.2014.0214. The text of this article is provided here with the permission of the French Review. It may be used only for scholarly, non-profit purposes.

  Early modern travel writers often compared the New World’s inhabitants to more familiar cultures. The French traveler Marc Lescarbot is a prominent example. Compared to other cultures, Amerindians emerge in his Histoire de la Nouvelle France (1609) as a favorable model for France to emulate. This article examines an overlooked point of comparison that superficially would seem to undermine Lescarbot’s favorable outlook on the Amerindian: the Turk. Lescarbot wrote about Turks in surprisingly positive terms, a fact that brings nuance to scholarly understandings of seventeenth-century France’s perception of the Ottoman Other, as well as the nature of colonial comparative ethnography.

• Date created

  2014-01-01

• Subjects / Keywords

  • New France
  • Marc Lescarbot
  • Turks
  • Gauls
  • Indigenous people
  • Canada
  • Seventeenth Century
  • New France

• Type of Item

  Article (Draft / Submitted)

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-5fyx-7j31

• License

  Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International