In the sixteenth century, a period of proliferating transatlantic
travel and exploration, and, latterly, religious civil wars in
France, the ship is freighted with political and religious, as well
as poetic, significance; symbolism that reaches its height when
ships-both real and symbolic-are threatened with disaster. The
Direful Spectacle argues that, in the French Renaissance, shipwreck
functions not only as an emblem or motif within writing, but as a
part, or the whole, of a narrative, in which the dynamics of
spectatorship and of co-operation are of constant concern. The
possibility of ethical distance from shipwreck-imagined through the
Lucretian suave mari magno commonplace-is constantly undermined,
not least through a sustained focus on the corporeal. This book
examines the ways in which the ship and the body are made analogous
in Renaissance shipwreck writing; bodies are described and
allegorized in nautical terms, and, conversely, ships themselves
become animalized and humanized. Secondly, many texts anticipate
that the description of shipwreck will have an affect not only on
its victims, but on those too of spectators, listeners, and
readers. This insistence on the physicality of shipwreck is also
reflected in the dynamic of bricolage that informs the production
of shipwreck texts in the Renaissance. The dramatic potential of
both the disaster and the process of rebuilding is exploited
throughout the century, culminating in a shipwreck tragedy. By the
late Renaissance, shipwreck is not only the end, but often forms
the beginning of a story.
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