THE ISLANDS OF THE PAGANS. HUMANISM AND ITS OTHERS ON THE FIRST ATLANTIC EXPANSION (1341)

Abstract

Before the Columbian voyages brought the American “new world” to Europe, the early Atlantic expansion over the Canary Islands had already placed the most famous Italian learned men in the face of the problem of understanding an alterity thus far unknown. The 1341 expedition to the Islands quickly generated letters and information that arrived to the hands of Giovanni Bocca¬ccio, who in a short Latin opuscula titled “De Canaria”, described the Canarian natives using the classical bucolic tradition as a model. We propose to analyze this text under the light of the “rhetoric of alterity” that it presents, con-sidering De Canaria as a founding text that constructs an European discursive tradition, in which the contemporary alterity was understood in relation to classic texts and images recovered by the renaissance humanism.