Sacred Seeds: New World Plants in Early Modern English Literature by Edward McLean Test

Author:Edward McLean Test
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT019000 Literary Criticism / Renaissance, LIT004120 Literary Criticism / European / English, Welsh, Renaissance, Scottish, Irish, English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, European, Literary Criticism
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Published: 2019-01-01T00:42:37.430000+00:00

The birds and their myth became so popular that they soon decorated the cartouches of many maps of the New World, adorned the curiosity cabinets of European aristocracy, became apotheosized as a constellation in the Southern Hemisphere, and even European kings carried the birds-of-paradise on standards into war (Apollo would have approved). If Pigafetta truly communicated with the Natives about these birds coming from the terrestrial Paradise, it must have been through sign language. There were no interpreters aboard his vessel. More likely, Columbus created the first trope of Paradise in the New World and subsequent explorers expected the same, naming objects and constellations accordingly. The inescapable meaning of Pigafetta’s narrative, however, is that the Natives informed him of birds from a Christian Paradise, not the reverse. What is divine for Native peoples of the New World becomes divine for European Christians, who co-opted pagan beliefs as they have for centuries.

From maps of Earth to maps of the heavens, Fracastoro’s “sacred birds of the sun” decorated the skies and also the country houses of English aristocrats. Consider Andrew Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House” (1652), one of English literature’s quintessential country house poems. Not surprisingly, the house contained the signature signs of wealthy items from abroad. Marvell, however, does more than merely list exotic and foreign objects. In this passage he provides a detailed attempt at understanding the “meaning” of a Mexican feather painting, or what was known in New Spain as arte plumária:

Out of these scatter’d Sibyls Leaves

Strange Prophecies my Phancy weaves:

And in one History consumes,

Like Mexique-Paintings, all the Plumes.

What Rome, Greece, Palestine, ere said

I in this light Mosaick read.

Thrice happy he who, not mistook,

Hath read in Natures mystick Book.27

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