ABSTRACT
The impact the widespread phenomenon of piracy had on Renaissance culture has not until now received sustained critical attention. Pirates often appear as characters in Renaissance literature and there are countless descriptions of seaborne crime in the historical record, yet only recently have scholars – including Barbara Fuchs, Daniel Vitkus, Jacques Lezra, Lois Potter, and Janice Thomson among others – begun to assess its importance as one of the key cultural mechanisms – such as long-range trade, migration, and proselytization – that actually connected cultures and regions in the Renaissance.1 My project builds on that work. Piracy is not simply or always a disruptive force, however much successive Renaissance (and later) governments tried to characterize it purely as a social and economic evil.2 This is the first book-length study to look at the cultural impact of Renaissance piracy and consider the ways it can, sometimes in surprising and resourceful ways, overlap and connect with, rather than merely challenge, some of the foundations underpinning contemporary orthodoxies – absolutism, patriarchy, hierarchy of birth, and the superiority of Europeans and the Christian religion over other peoples and belief systems. Renaissance pirates are frequently unruly, discontented figures, sniping from the sidelines of literary texts and historical records, but the objects of their ire are not always the expected targets. As we shall see pirates can be conservative figures nostalgically championing old-fashioned, outmoded patterns of behaviour rather than the embodiment of a radical social and political agenda. Furthermore ‘piracy’ is a complex, flexible and multivalent term, capable of deployment in a wide range of circumstances and for a variety of reasons, its use often motivated by the interests of particular individuals, groups or nations. A key concern of this book will be to explore the semantics of ‘piracy’: to understand the reasons why this term is employed in particular situations, and to examine the grounds for its popularity as a rhetorical tool.
