Le corps de l’autre: de l’altérité à la ressemblance

In the first Decade of his book about the discovery of the New World, De Orbe Nouo, Peter Martyr of Anghiera doesn’t deal with the protagonists’ psychology. But what he says about bodies is a way to describe at the same time the evolution of the relationship between Spaniards and natives and the evolution of the author’s point of view. At the beginning, spaniards’ bodies never appear and natives are described as radically differents, because of their nudity and the cannibalism of some of them. After that, the resemblance becomes more pronounced: first because nudity and cannibalism fade out, secondly because war and its consequences, violence and anger, make all both parties more and more similar. At the end of the first Decade, natives who survive look and act like their conquerors, as we can see in Fracastoro’s poem Syphilis sive de morbo Gallico.

Abstract licence: CC BY

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