A telling example of the sixteenth-century adaptability of the term "New World," aptly illustrating how the concepts of "discovery" and "newness" can be challenged, appropriated, and played with, appears in Charles Fontaine’s Les nouvelles, & Antiques merveilles (1554). Fontaine argues that the New World was not discovered by Christopher Columbus, or by Amerigo Vespucci, but by a Frenchman named "Bethencourt": ie croy, & tiens que Betencourty fut le premier, non pour favoriser a ma nation (car Betencourt estoit Frangoys) ains par ce que le [sic] date que ie trouve aux livres latins, quand Americ trouva lesdictes terres, est depuis, & long temps apres la date que ie trouve que Betencourty fut.
I believe, and hold that Bethencourt was the first there, not in order to favor my own nation (Bethencourt was a Frenchman), but because the year I find in Latin topics, on which Amerigo found said islands, is later, and very well after the year on which I [also] find that Bethencourt went there.]1
The dispute rests on what lands or islands qualify as being part of the "new" world, for Jean de Bethencourt indeed "discovered" and partly conquered the Canary Islands, well before Columbus or Vespucci ever set foot in America. Francois de Belleforest, also seeking to establish the pre-eminence of French explorers, uses a strategy antithetical to that of Fontaine. In L’Histoire universelle (1570), instead of conflating the Canary Islands with the Americas, Belleforest dissolves the new "Occident" into its constituents. While conceding the discovery of "Mexique," "Peru," and "Cusco" to the Spaniards, he makes sure to attribute that of "Floride," "Canada," and "Labradour," to Jacques Cartier, and one anonymous nobleman from Milleraye.2
"Discovery" is a conceptual argument related to authority, quite effective in legitimizing a claim, and all the more so in a period of nascent copyrights and legally approved conquests. Used bluntly or subtly, it can undermine foreign or past achievements—sometimes under the guise of praises—and promote or justify one’s own relevance next to the Portuguese and Spanish empires, the Ancients’ knowledge, or the medieval encyclopedic monuments. What I will consider in the next few pages, however, is not how "newness" as a discursive artifact is granted or refused to variously contested acts of discovery and/or invention; but rather how "newness" and "discovery," and the early-modern invention thereof, intersect with the advent of print culture in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and beyond. "Newness," as a rhetorical argument, helps push forward new discourses—or old texts under new guises—and new methods of distribution; it is a license to print, and an incentive to read.
Incremental Newness and Print Culture: Addenda, Serializations, Periodicals
In the mid-sixteenth century, the French literary world came into the grip of a best-selling craze, imported from Spain, and yet promptly "Frenchified":3 the ever-expanding series of the Amadis de Gaule. The Spanish original printed series, launched by Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo, ran from topics I (1508) to XII (1546). Spin-offs and additional sequels were numerous and quick to follow. The first eight topics of the French remake were penned by Nicolas Herberay des Essarts, and came out at roughly one-year intervals between 1540 and 1548.
As Virginia Krause has recently argued, the French Amadis marks the advent of a new romance format, quick to be imitated and criticized: serialization.4 Starting with the fourth installment, "narrative modes begin to encourage readers to keep reading from one topic to the next, using each new topic to program a desire for a sequel."5 The fifth topic prefatory verses could hardly be more explicit in this regard:
Quand d’Amadis j’ay veu le Premier livre, Il me fait estre amoureux du Second, Et ceste amour ne me veult laisser vivre Sans voir le Tiers, tant me semble facond. Et puis ce Tiers, qui au Quart me semond,
Me fait plus fort desirer le Cinquiesme.
[When I saw Amadis's first topic,
It made me fall in love with the second:
And this love does not want to let me live,
Without seeing the third, so fruitful does it seem:
And then this third, which summons me to the fourth,
Makes me desire the fifth even more strongly.]6
Serialization and desire for hitherto unpublished material entails a posit of what we might call incremental newness; not only as a positive attribute, but also as a criteria of pertinence to publish and of desire to read. As Michel Simonin observes, the Amadis series "asserts itself as novel, or better yet as provoking the steady updating of newness" through "the extensions, sequels, or simply volumes, supposedly engendered as if by the genealogical proliferation of the characters."7 Notwithstanding that Amadis may indeed be the first French literary narrative to "consciously and constantly be promoted by virtue of its newness,"8 the occurrence of texts and paratexts positing newness as a meliorative attribute is well distributed among period genres and formats.9 Early print editions of medieval and contemporary chronicles, for example, are highly susceptible to arguments relying on the desirability of updating processes. Robert Gaguin’s Compendium de origine et gestis Francorum (1495) kept on being published, revised, and expanded, well beyond the death of its author in 1501. Nicole de la Chesnaye’s French translation, titled Les grandes chroniques, appeared in 1514;10 its first and subsequent editions each are printed with new additions covering events up to the issuing year, as extolled on title pages. Most of the new material is penned by Pierre Desrey, an experienced continuateur who also authored the 1513 supplements to the French translation of Werner Rolevinck’s Fasciculus temporum1 Desrey’s additions appear at the very end of every edition consulted, in the format of chronologically stratified appendices.
From the 1518 edition onwards, Gaguin’s chronicles are retitled La mer des croniques et mirouer hystorial de France, possibly in order to gain market share over another lucrative yet aging collection of chronicles and addenda: La mer des histoires, which offers a further example of the display of incremental newness. "Mer des histoires [sea of stories]" being a locution quite common in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century titles, it is difficult to establish how many versions exist, and which ones are directly related to Jean de Columna or Giovanni Colonna’s Mare historiarum, or to the Rudimentum novitiorum first printed at Lubeck in 1475. Greater confusion yet abounds concerning the various continuations of La Mer, as if the anonymity of the source material particularly allowed the multiplication of alternate versions, additional volumes, and revisions. And yet—as with Gaguin’s chronicles—one element is systemic: the professed commitment to continual updates, up to the current year. The 1536 and 1543 editions, respectively published by Galliot du Pre and C. Langelier, pledge to offer "toutes les hystoires, actes et faictz dignes de memoire puis la creation du monde jusques en I’an mil cinq cens. xxxvi [all the stories, events, and deeds worth remembering, from the Creation of the World up to the year 1536]," and "jusques en l’an mil cinq cens xliii [up to the year 1543]." Editors also unilaterally added new volumes to the original two. An anonymous Parisian printer thus offered Le quatriesme livre de la mer des hystoires [The fourth volume of the Sea of Stories] as early as 1518; yet in 1550 Jean Le Gendre’s newly composed addition is titled Tier livre de la fleur et mer des hystoires [Third volume of the Flower and Sea of Stories].
Additions to Gaguin’s chronicles and to La mer des histoires borrow both structurally and literally from Eusebius of Caesarea’s Chronicon. Eusebius died c.339 CE, yet, similarly to Gaguin’s Compendium, the updating of his Chronographia, as preserved in Jerome’s Latin translation, far survived his demise. Jerome himself filled in the years 326-78; Sulpicius Severus expanded it to 403; Paulus Orosius, to 417; Prosper of Aquitaine, to 455; Idiatus, to 468; Marcellinus, courtier of the Emperor Justinian, to 534; Victor Tunnunensis or Tonnennensis, Bishop of Tunis, to 566; John of Bisclaro or Bisclarum, to 590; etc.12 Emerging in the 1470s, printed editions of Eusebius’s Chronicon continued the tradition of offering new material. Henri Estienne’s 1512 edition thus includes Matthias Palermus’s update to 1481, while the period 1482-1512 is covered by Johannes Multivallis of Tournai; both additions are prominently announced on its title page.13 Moreover, the Chronicon provided a typographical framework—numbers and columns14—which not only was followed by subsequent works, such as Achilles Pirminus Gasser’s Historiarum chronicorum mundi epitome (1532), or Jean du Tillet’s La chronique des roys des France …jusques en l’an 1551 (1551); but also provided a remarkably undemanding technique of integrating the "discovery" of America into both pre-existing and newly composed chronologies. Gasser’s Epitome, updated and translated into French, thus gives, next to the heading "1492," this straightforward notice, conveniently free of details: "AucunesIsles en la mer Oceane totallement incongneues des anciens / furent en ce temps trouvees comme ung nouveau monde" [In those times were found, as a New World, some Islands in the Oceanic sea unknown to the Ancients].15 As Elizabeth Eisenstein asserted, Europe’s printing revolution featured throngs of master texts, widely distributed and yet easily amended: new discoveries could be incorporated into newer editions, and thus printing contributed to the invention of an accumulative research tradition.16
Eisenstein’s argument is a reply to that of Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, who observed that the advent of printing at first massively featured medieval texts, as the needs of the new presses could only be met by the old manuscripts.17 Overlooking "the possibility that an increased output of old texts may have contributed to the shaping of new ideas,"18 Febvre and Martin consequently postulated that the early-modern printing industry bestowed cultural inertia, through the accelerated diffusion of "ancient bias" and "appealing falsehoods," notably as pertaining to geographical data.19 Marshall McLuhan, however, contended that even if "the first two centuries of print culture were almost wholly medieval in content," it was not a new message, but a new medium that induced major epistemic shifts in early-modern Europe.20 That newness-related arguments are on display even in the paratext of aging, yet newly printed, editions of medieval texts—whether or not the latter are updated—corroborates McLuhan’s argument: the staging of "newness," and of its "discovery," are ostensibly functions of print-culture processes themselves.
With the advent of printing, even age-old medieval texts such as pseudo-Aristotle’s Secretum secretorum or the anonymous Secretz de la nature were capable, through vernacularization and greater diffusion, of helping to implement a "shift in consciousness" signaled by "the publication in the sixteenth century of scores of ‘topics of secrets’ that professed to reveal, to anyone who could read them, the secrets of nature and the arts."21 Older texts were pushed forward under new guises, as though newly exposed, and in some instances the strategy appears to have been malicious: Marco Polo’s Description geographique … nouvellement reduict en vulgaire Frangois [Geographical description ... newly rendered in the French vernacular] (Paris, 1556) is falsely portrayed as the very first French version of Polo’s travels—an astonishing claim; while Gossuin de Metz’s Mirouer du monde nouvellement imprime [Newly printed mirror of the World] (Geneva, 1517) is represented as having been newly composed by one "Francoys Buffereau" over the years 1514-16, even though Gossuin’s thirteenth-century Image du monde had already been printed in Paris in 1501.
It should therefore not be overly unexpected that the "genealogy" of texts supplementing Eusebius’s Chronicon—which, according to Howard Bloch, participates "in a medieval epistemology of origins by which truth and value" are grounded "at their source, and in the very idea of source"22—would nonetheless supply early-modern Europe with a first prototype for later newspapers, in which every "supplement" was eventually set to be as independent and as "fresh" as possible. The counterintuitive metamorphosis of a text relying on its ancestry into texts relying on newness is a further example of old texts producing new effects. Specific stages in this metamorphosis can be identified. Thus, while his aim is completeness rather than contemporaneousness alone, Pierre Desrey, relieved through Gaguin’s "preliminary work" of having to write his way up to 1500, nonetheless qualifies as a practitioner of "histoire immediate" [history as it unfolds].23 His additions are, however, sold as bound to Gaguin’s Compendium. This is a constraint that the later, anonymous Quatriesme livre de la mer des hystoires (1518) is relieved of, since the "installment" is published separately. And so it is with every topic of the Amadis de Gaule series.
While the advent of stand-alone, periodical issues per se is an invention, throughout Europe, of the early seventeenth century,24 the immediate antecedent to Theophraste Renaudot’s Gazette—which started in 1631 and is usually considered to be the first French (weekly) newspaper25—is yet another series of addenda to chronicles. Pierre Victor Cayer, also known as Palma Cayer, published his Chronologie septenaire, covering the years 1598-1604, in Paris, 1605. Its "prequel," the Chronologie novenaire, followed three years later, covering the years 1589-97. Jean Richer, Cayer’s editor, later supplied a sequel periodical to the Chronologies, titled Le Mercure Frangois [The French Mercury], or bearer of news. Twenty-five volumes were published between 1611 and 1648.26 From the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, the warrant for supplemental material to chronicles thus shifted from a standard of "completeness" to one of "newness." Rather than referring directly to specific content, "newness" was a discursive, medium-related argument of pertinence.
Rituals of Discovery
Discursive "unprecedentedness" is staged in accordance with specific constraints pertaining to genres and formats. Those constraints, as well as texts and paratexts arguing "newness" as a meliorative attribute, are particularly remarkable when the argument is demonstrably false. On the recycling of material in sixteenth-century anthologies of nouvelles [short stories]—a genre in which topicality and quirkiness are especially cherished—Gabriel-A. Perouse observed that editors commended the freshness of the featured stories even when they were borrowed, and already well-known. On account that "nouvelles are substantially and necessarily associated with topicality," assertions of newness "are considered to be essential by the editors" and "loudly proclaimed"; "it [thus] makes more sense to lie" about actual newness "rather than risk falling into" the nonsensical and non-existing genre that "non-topical nouvelles" would have been.27 In chronicles and related addenda, it is temporal and geographical comprehensiveness that asserts "newness" and relevance, as illustrated by Jean Longin’s paratextual strategy in his edition of Jean Le Gendre’s aforementioned Tier livre—which Longin issued simultaneously to the first two (updated) volumes of the Mer des histoires. Longin deploys both temporal and geographical comprehensiveness as a pertinence (or marketing) argument. Even though his version of the first two volumes of La mer des histoires covers events "iusques en l’an Mil cinq cens. l. [up to the year 1550]," the 1543-50 additions are said to privilege "les choses faictes & advenues en France [events which occurred in France]." Le Gendre’s Tier livre supposedly and conveniently offers the outstanding international news: "lafleur et mer des hystoiresplus celebres & memorables advenues tant en l’Asie & Affricque qu’en l’Europpe … commengant en l’an mil cinq cens trente & cinq, & continuant iusques en l’an mil cinq cens cinquante & ung [The Flower and Sea of Stories most famous & worthy of memory, that happened in Asia & Africa, as much as in Europe ... starting from the year 1535, and continuing up to the year 1551]."28 However, once past the title page, Longin’s strategy comes undone: Le Gendre does not conceal his preference for French and—to a smaller extent—European events.29 Moreover, and notwithstanding its title, Le Gendre’s chronicle ends in 1550. The importance of topicality and comprehensiveness, in the genre of the chronicles, is aptly demonstrated by the desirability of inaccurate assertions to that effect.
However, the format employed to convey newness and to emulate the act of discovery is first and foremost that of the occasionnel: short, cheap relations of recent and important events, such as battles, coronations, funerals, and royal entries.30 The occasionnel format, incidentally, is another canonical antecedent to seventeenth-century periodicals:31 Jean-Pierre Seguin, pioneer in the study of canards and occasionnels, alternatively called them "non-periodical information bulletins."32 Printed news bulletins, or topical literary pieces, are as old as printing itself, and facilitated the advent of the new medium,33 much as variously serialized and renewable texts, such as calendars, almanacs, and ephemerides, aided the fifteenth-century onset of print culture. Throughout Europe, their production outputs cluster around specific events: the fall of Negroponte to the Turks (1470),34 the War of the League of Cambrai (1508-16),35 the Sack of Rome (1527),36 Charles V’s conquest of Tunis (1535),37 etc. Occasionnels are not unrelated to chronicles or large ensembles in that many exotic news bulletins, such as Niccolo de’ Conti’s 1414-39 travels to South and South East Asia, and L ‘Histoire du Nouveau Monde descouvertpar les Portugaloys—a short, 12-sheet octavo published in 1556—are in fact off-prints taken out of heavy volumes, respectively Poggio Bracciolini’s De varietate fortunae and Pietro Bembo’s Historiae Venetae (1551). The opposite also holds true: past its immediate newsworthiness, Columbus’s 1493 Epistola found its way into many chronicles and anthologies, throughout the sixteenth century and beyond.
The most famous fifteenth-century occasionnel is undoubtedly Columbus’s "Letter to Santangel," which survives in 12 editions from 1493 to 1497, in a format ranging from three to seven leaves.38 Yet the staging of the act of discovery is in fact quite common in news bulletins, from the sighting and report of comets, deformed stillborns, and fallen cities, to exclusive prophecies and the promulgation of competing cures to new diseases. Many elements from the French topical literature that accompanied Charles VIII’s 1494-95 military campaign into Italy, for example, are eerily similar to what can be found in contemporary and subsequent narratives relating to the Americas: from the wonders of stunning riches and previously unknown fruits and vegetables, to enthusiastic accounts of the willingness of locals to be subdued and conquered, to the usual yet somewhat counterintuitive mixture of admiring otherness and wanting to annihilate it— "toutefois on leur apprendra le train de france" [however we will teach them the habits of France].39 Reports from the Americas and the Franco-Italian Wars also share the obvious trait of referring to foreign locales; foreignness, as a discursive construct, helped shape topical literature formats, to the point where the seventeenth century’s first newspapers "were almost entirely concerned with foreign news."40
As a matter of fact, directly relevant to the advent of periodicals, albeit usually not recognized as such, are mission newsletters. Mostly from the Americas, Asia, and the Middle East, they were heavily marketed, sometimes misleadingly, as providing both exotic and new locales, and the very latest news thereof.41 By the late sixteenth century, Jesuit letters were massively distributed in accordance with their professed exoticism and incremental newness; witness the printer Michel Sonnius’s title to his 1571 collection: Recueil desplus fraisches lettres, escrittes des Indes Orientales, par ceux de la Compagnie du nom de Iesus, qui y font residence, & envoiees l’an 1568.69. & 70 [Collection of the freshest letters written from the Oriental Indies by Jesuits living there, sent during the years 1568, 1569, and 1570].42 Exoticism, however, is only a superficial attribute ofthe occasionnel format. Seguin’s recension of 517 canards from 1529 to 1631 lists many titles concerning the frightening Turks, yet the vast majority relates to crimes and criminals, natural calamities, dangerous beasts, miracles, monstrous births, and nearly 100 reports on "supernatural" atmospheric phenomena.43 Othering, as a meta-category, rather more accurately accounts for the various descriptions and narratives on display. The news is staged as a spectacle alien to its public: calamities and crimes are set as extraordinarily catastrophic or evil, and criminals and beasts as heinous fiends. Local yet abnormal animals are described as chimeric amalgams, much like exotic species: Cuban fishes with the body of a shell-less turtle, the head of an ox, the agreeableness of dolphins, and the docility of an elephant,44 rub shoulders with one outlandish calf sporting a lion’s mane, the hindquarters of a horse, the belly of a stag, and the extra head of a dog, born on the 10th of May, 1569, in the village of Bellifontaine, two leagues away from Abbeville.45
Some of the material for the staging of "unprecedentedness" is demonstrably rehashed. Seguin lists a few cases of printers tampering with titles, dates, and names, in order to pass off old events as new.46 Rehashing is, however, not always malicious: it can be an arbitrary, almost automatic function of print-culture processes. Pierre Desrey’s updated Chroniques include, for the year 1509, a brief mention of seven Native North Americans brought back and exhibited in the city of Rouen.47 Those "sept hommes saulvages" [seven wild men] are unexpectedly declared to be from an island alternately named "Terre neufve" [Newfoundland] and "Orane en affrique" [Oran in Africa], the latter referring to the Algerian city— which, of course, neither is an island, nor was "newly found" at the time. The confusion originates from a mistranslation of Johannes Multivallis’s addition to Eusebius’s Chronicon, which relates two distinct events of 1509: "Oranum in Africa ab Hispanis capitur. Septem homines sylvestres ex ea insula (quae terra novi dicitur) Rothomagum adducti sunt cum cymba vestimentis & armis eorum" [Oran in Africa was captured by the Spaniards. Seven Wild Men, of this island called Newfoundland, were brought to Rouen with their vessel clothes and weapons].48 Yet Desrey’s unfortunate translation and confusion of Multivallis is reiterated verbatim by the aforementioned Quatriesme livre de la mer des hystoires (1518).49 In Jean Longis’s Mer des histoires (1550), the conflation is complete; "Newfoundland," as a toponym, has vanished: "Environ ce temps fut prins par les Portugalois en une terre nouvellement trouvee par eulx en lysle de Orane tirant vers affrique une maniere de gens sauvages" [About the same time were captured by the Portuguese, in a newly found part of the island of Oran near Africa, a variety of savage people].50 From one version to the next, yet apparently without additional sources being used, the anecdote is altered and expanded. Desrey ascribes the discovery of Newfoundland/Oran to Spaniards, and the capture of the Wild Men to Normans; but La mer des histoires (1550) attributes both the discovery and the capture to the Portuguese. Even more tellingly, Desrey’s observation that "Leurs viandes sont chairs rosties" [They eat cooked meat]51 comes to be corrected according to contemporary stereotypes: "Ilz mangeuent la chair crue" [They eat uncooked meat].52
The setting of Oran as a newly discovered island is a proof ab absurdo that both "discovery" and "newness" are textual artifacts whose implementation is primarily governed by discursive constraints. New information obviously circulates, since mentions of newly found lands—even if falsely reported—move from one text to the next. Yet additions to chronicles primarily refer to alternate utterances. Pierre Bourdieu’s term "circular circulation"—a vicious cycle of information built upon previously uttered statements, in which specific content is hard to put in, and harder yet to take out53—aptly, if anachronistically, describes the phenomenon of constant reiterations.
On account of cognitive, doctrinal, and discursive constraints, the staging of "newness" and its "discovery" is highly stereotypical, that is to say ritualized. Eating uncooked meat—or human flesh—is such a highly-predictable characteristic in descriptions of cultural otherness, that its proclamation is called upon, as a component of a specific litany, even when it should have been irrelevant. Another term coined by Bourdieu is of value here: "I’extraordinaire ordinaire" [ordinary extraordinariness],54 which designates discursive elements whose pertinence is based upon their professed unexpectedness, even while they are being constantly reported—such as monstrous births by occasionnels. Monstrous births are sometimes given a moral interpretation, or predictive properties, which are themselves highly predictable: they are signs of the decline of societal mores, or omens of great catastrophes to come. Critics of the Amadis phenomenon coined neologisms—"amadiser," "amadigauliser"—in order to mock the artificially bulked-up adventures of the eponymous hero, or even to scoff at stereotypical courtship procedures associated with the series.55 By the same token, the discoveries of "New India" and "New Africa" share props, characters, and lines of dialogue, with that of the Americas.56 It is much less demanding to deploy "discovery" and "newness" as a set of procedures—that is to say as discursive ceremonies—than as heuristic devices intent on shattering worldviews.
Conclusion
"Each literary text," according to Terence Cave, is a metaphorical "hapax": "even if inserted in a tradition or a set of rigorous conventions, it stresses its own difference."57 Regardless of Cave’s attempt to connect singularity to the concept of literature, his observation also holds true in relation to all the texts mentioned so far. Ultimately, the staging of "discovery" and that of "newness" are textual and paratextual strategies toward claiming the hapax-status. Their display is, furthermore, concomitant with the advent of print culture and the invention of copyrights—the latter expressed, in early-modern France, by the granting of privileges.58 Evidently, early-modern Europe indeed featured many discoveries, inventions, and novelties, regardless of contentious specifics. Present early-modern studies—however less so than previously—are, furthermore, precisely insistent on texts deemed to be hapaxes: masterworks, prefigurations of modernity, nexuses of cultural intermingling and epistemic disturbances, and so on. Looking solely at "revolutionary" texts, however, easily gives rise to the impression that revolutionary contents are strongly correlated with claims of revolutionary content. I hope to have shown otherwise.
