Michael Wintroub. The Voyage of Thought

Much has been written about the worldview of Christopher Columbus and about the people, riches, and biblical landscapes, real and imagined, that populate his descriptions. But, as Michael Wintroub reminds us in The Voyage of Thought: Navigating Knowledge across the Sixteenth-Century World, a thought-provoking work based on long-neglected sources related to a 1529 French expedition from Dieppe to Sumatra, European empires were based on replication: voyage after voyage, each attempting to follow a (mythical) pattern and yet never without variation. Wintroub begins each of his six chapters—“Information,” “Expertise,” “Translation,” “Scale,” “Confidence,” and “Replication”—with an etymological exploration of the chapter’s title word. This unpacking is largely speculative, leaping from French to Latin to English and disassembling and assembling words with only occasional reference to contemporary dictionaries or usage, but this exercise highlights the various and contradictory nature of each word’s connotations. Indeed, each chain of associations soon descends into murky depths where fraud, unreliability, insincerity, and immorality threaten the words’ surface promise of reassuring utility. The title words were chosen not only for their slipperiness, however, but also for their salience to the culture of the early sixteenth century, as Wintroub shows with apt examples drawn from the milieu of the Sumatran expedition’s funder, Jean Ango, and leaders, the brothers Jean and Raoul Parmentier, who were enmeshed in the literary, commercial, and civic cultures of Normandy. These snapshots include the Frise des Sauvages at the Church of Saint-Jacques in Dieppe; poetry submitted for the poetic concourses (Puys) in Rouen and Dieppe by Jean Parmentier and the expedition’s navigator, Pierre Crignon; the two public shipboard dissections conducted en route to Sumatra; and the log Crignon kept during the voyage and the pamphlet he published on his return.

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