ABSTRACT

This chapter seeks to explore how Early Modern travel narratives mobilized and challenged the notion of universal history in the way they dealt with the genuine novelty of colonial encounters. More specifically, it will focus on how notions of universal history and multiple temporalities are in play in the work of the Dutch engraver Théodore de Bry, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1590). This approach may be surprising, at first, given the absence of direct references to universal history in de Bry’s Report. However, as the analysis will make clear, the dichotomy between European letters and Native American tattoos that undergirds the volume is not only an expression of cultural superiority and a “denial of coevalness” (Fabian), but also implies, in almost a paradoxical fashion, a sense of universal history through the claim that all cultures share a common ground and a common scheme of evolution. Indeed, de Bry’s representations of the Indians and the ancient British Picts are linked to central concerns of universal history, in particular to a reflection about possible universal laws of development, but also to an idea of the universal as a form of narrative that supposedly includes all the earth’s peoples and their histories. This chapter, then, is the story of the Indian and the Pict, ethnography and history, and it is the history of how particulars merge to form a more universal narrative, a more universal history.