Decentring the Renaissance: Canada and Europe in Multidisciplinary Perspective, 1500-1700

Olaf Uwe Janzen is a professor of history at Memorial University,
reviews editor of The Northern Mariner, and the editor of Northern Seas.

“Readers may be feeling a little dizzy after all this decentring,”
writes N.Z. Davis in one of the essays in this collection. And so they
should. These are the heavily revised proceedings of a 1996
interdisciplinary conference that did so much more than simply examine
the way in which Europeans between 1500 and 1700 discovered and
responded to the existence of a world entirely new to them and quite
beyond their ken. Instead, the conference attempted to focus on “the
interaction between [old and new worlds] and on the ways we attempt to
interpret it.” Interesting, innovative, and laudable as this goal is,
it ultimately lacks clarity of definition and focus. This, of course, is
often typical of published conference papers. But in this particular
case, the introduction and conclusion are so jargon-laden that one
almost needs a postmodern, postcolonial primer to decipher the essential
core of the project.

The papers focus on the English and French experience in that part of
the (to them) “New World” that lay north of where their Iberian
counterparts were active. The papers are organized into four
parts—methodologies, mentalities, contemporary efforts at
interpretation, and specific experiences—followed by an afterword. A
variety of experiences are thus examined—European and Aboriginal,
Basque, French and English, Jesuit and entrepreneurial—which will
attract scholars to particular essays. Yet here also lies the book’s
great drawback: while it displays all the earmarks of the new “New
History”—multiplicity (of voices), interdisciplinarity, and
explicitness (of method)—it also lacks coherence. Consider, for
instance, the first section of papers, which deal with conceptual
issues. They are pretty much state of the art, yet they underscore,
rather than resolve, the problems facing postcolonial, postmodernist
cultural history today. They often stand in sharp disagreement with each
other, especially on the key epistemological issue of writing a
“history” that embraces non-Western sources and non-Western concepts
of “time,” myth,” and “history.” In sum, this is a book for
experts interested in a debate that is just beginning.