ABSTRACT
It has been said that cannibalism is an acquired taste. To some extent, Jean de Léry, during his stay in Brazil from 1556 to 1557, did acquire that taste. In his preface Léry declares his intention to rectify fallacious accounts by two of his predecessors in Brazil: the settler Nicolas de Villegagnon and the explorer André Thevet. The vocabulary Léry employs to describe these horrific acts decidedly invites readers to establish analogies beyond the historical account in two ways. Léry further opines that French Catholic cannibalism exceeds Brazilian savagery because it involves eating not enemy tribes, but rather family, neighbors and compatriots. The most complex forms of cannibalism evoked in Histoire d'un voyage work quite differently from the examples of obliteration and war. The theological debate between Calvinists and Catholics concerning Christ's body in the Eucharist is, however, more complex and more fraught than the symbolic/literal divide represented by Léry in his accusations against Villegagnon in the Histoire.
