As I’ve been working‚Äînot very well, I’m afraid, as I have spent all of the Thanksgiving holiday laid up with a cold‚Äîon my Pietro Martire paper for this week’s Early Modern Workshop at Harvard, I’ve been thinking a great deal about Natalie Zemon Davis’ Trickster Travels. Trickster, Davis’ re-imagining of the fascinating (and ultimately unknowable) life story of Leo Africanus, engages with many of the same themes that my ongoing study of Martire’s Legatio Babylonica has placed in front of me‚Äîwhether they be the intricacies of premodern diplomacy between Muslims and Christians, or the many possibilities for boundary-crossing and self-fashioning that the Renaissance Mediterranean afforded charismatic individuals linving on both sides of the putative Christian-Muslim ‘divide.’ In some sense, I see Martire’s story as a counterpoint to Leo Africanus’s. As one reads Martire’s account of his experiences in Egypt, one can see a committed Christian struggling to understand North Africa on its own terms, in order to relate it to fellow Europeans in their terms. He’s no less of a ‘translator,’ I would say, than Leo Africanus, though his personal story is much less interesting‚Äîat least insofar as it would be impossible even for Davis to turn him into the charmingly enigmatic “trickster” that she makes Leo out to have been.
While my admiration for Davis’ work remains unchanged‚Äîif anything, hearing her former students’ tributes and watching her in action at her 80th birthday symposium only increased it‚ÄîI do, nevertheless, have one big question for Davis about her portrait of Leo Africanus. I will probably begin my remarks on Martire tomorrow evening by justifying my decision to study his embassy, and I plan to make a claim that Spain’s engagement with the Muslim empires of the Levant left a measurable imprint on development of modern Spanish state, society, and culture. In other words, figures like Martire mattered beyond the intrinsic interest of their individual stories. If we take away Ramusio, whose later editions of Leo Africanus’s works were crucial in preserving their author’s historical memory, can the same be said of Leo Africanus? Did his description of Africa demonstrably change Europeans’ impressions of the continent and its peoples? Or does he matter more simply for the possibilities that his individual story reveals? In other words, I suppose I’m asking‚Äîto borrow a distinction beautifully drawn by Jill Lepore in her “Historians Who Love Too Much”1‚Äîis he a biographical figure, or merely the vehicle for a microhistory of North Africa and Renaissance Rome?
- Jill Lepore, ‚ÄúHistorians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography,‚Äù Journal of American History 88 (2001), 129-144. I should note that I was only reminded of this article, fortuitously, by reading Rebecca Goetz’ terrific syllabus. [↩]