'The Renaissance on Board, Really? Revisiting Jean and Raoul Parmentier's Mythified Voyage to Sumatra in 1529'

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Romain Bertrand (Sciences Po/CERi)

Now almost forgotten, Jean and Raoul Parmentier's 1529 expedition from Normandy to Sumatra's Westcoast was posited in the XIXth century as a successful, even glorious French contribution to the (alas mostly Iberian) achievements of the "Age of Discovery". Whereas it actually was a pitiful endeavor, either by economic or by political standards, it was raised to the status of an almost fabled event so as to boost French wavering colonial credentials. Even if it has shed a more realistic light on this enterprise, contemporary intellectual history may have helped restore its mystifying aura by turning it into a piece of evidence of the way "Renaissance high culture" travelled on board commercial ships by the early XVIth century. Using a social history perspective and building on unpublished archival material from Dieppe, Rouen and Le Havre, this presentation will attempt to show that officers and mariners on board "La Pensée" and "Le Sacre" were not would-be literati, but the bearers of highly localized, "situated" knowledges that had more to do with subaltern analogist understandings of the world than with any naturalist ontology-in-the-making. This, in turn, will lead us to reappraise the epistemic conditions of possibility of the (failed) "first encounters" between Europe and Southeast Asia.