ABSTRACT
The ‘savage’ occupied a liminal space between the human and the animal. The Middle French sauvage pertained to the wilderness or to spaces beyond human control. The postclassical salvagiusi, like sauvage, looked back at the Latin silva (woods). It invoked the pastoral and natural, and did not always carry negative connotations. 1 However, while ‘savages’ as ‘naturals’ or innocent beings appeared in the sixteenth-century writings of the French essayist Michel de Montaigne or the Huguenot colonist Jean de Léry in Brazil, the more neutral connotations of ‘savage’ or its variant ‘salvage’ appeared less frequently in English texts. 2 The English acknowledged that they too had developed their societies from savage roots, but this did not incline them to envisage perceived savages as embodying a benign state of being. More often, ‘savage’ carried connotations of corruption, brutality, or barbarity. Since ‘civil’ rooted virtuous human behaviour in town-dwelling and political organisation, ‘savage’ was its antithesis, relating to remote or undomesticated places as well as peoples. 3 ‘Barbarian’, on the other hand, was used to characterise polities that Europeans deemed tyrannical or corrupt. Both ‘savage’ and ‘barbarian’ were terms that heavily informed English articulations of their own sense of civility in the context of cross-cultural encounters.
