Debating Multiple Worlds: Verse Paratexts in the Works of André Thevet

• In Event: Imagining the New World: Poets in the Age of Discovery

Abstract

Recently, the way in which poets in a post-Ptolemaic universe imagined the discovery of the New World has been the object of renewed scholarly inquiry (Ramachandran 2015). While the contribution of epic poets has been frequently emphasized, this paper will examine the neglected genre of liminary poetry in the works of the French Renaissance cosmographer André Thevet (1516-1590). French poets often had recourse to the idea of multiple worlds in their verse paratexts to Thevet’s Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique (1557) and La Cosmographie universelle (1575). Etienne Jodelle, François de Belleforest and Jean Dorat each alluded to a celebrated maxim on the existence of multiple universes, found in classical sources such as Valerius Maximus and later cited in Renaissance texts by figures like Erasmus. In their poems, the relation between multiple worlds and New World discoveries was variously endorsed, doubted or rejected.

Author

• Myron McShane, University of Toronto