Date/Time
Date(s) - 30 Mar 2012
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Location
University of Pennsylvania McNeil Center for Early American Studies
Category(ies) No Categories
2012 Mellon Distinguished Lecture Series
Sponsored by the School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania and the University of Pennsylvania Press
LECTURE THREE: “Secota: The Landscape at the End of History”
Friday, March 30, 3:00 PM
(Please note the change in time for the last lecture)
McNeil Center for Early American Studies
3355 Woodland Walk
In 1585 the English scientist Thomas Harriot and an artist named John White arrived on the outer banks of modern-day North Carolina and took it upon themselves to create a detailed portrait of the place that they labeled Virginia–better known to us today as Roanoke, the site of what became, at the end of the 1580s, the famous “lost” English colony. White’s American pictures became popular after a Flemish engraver named Theodor de Bry published them in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1590. De Bry’s book contained the text of Harriot’s short treatise about Roanoke, entitled “A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia.” De Bry’s was the first European book about an American subject published simultaneously in four languages (English, French, German, and Latin), which virtually guaranteed it a large readership. Indeed, as I will discuss in this lecture, the illustrations in the “Briefe and True Report” were the most important representations of Native North Americans in circulation until the nineteenth century. Together, the text and the images memorialize a lost world and its diverse creatures. The lecture concludes with native North Americans’ ideas about, as one later French commentator called it, the “pays des âmes”—the country of souls—where the Algonquian dead journeyed after leaving Roanoke. The last of my essays ends with Europeans and Americans struggling to understand the changing environments of the Atlantic world and the impact of this new and transformed nature upon their diverse religious beliefs and cultures.
Series information:
Nature and Culture in the Early Modern World
Peter C. Mancall
Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities
University of Southern California
This series of three lectures will explore aspects of the relationship between people and nature in the Atlantic World in the sixteenth
century. Each of the lectures will begin with paintings: a series of images in a fourteenth-century cloister in the south of France; a
hand-painted atlas, now housed at the Huntington Library, created in Dieppe in 1547; and a 1585 water color of a Carolina Algonquian town by the English artist John White, now in the collection of the British Museum.