The Age of Self Discovery: Inventing France in the Early Modern Americas
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Debates about migration and cultural contact have sparked controversy in France, as elsewhere, in recent years, but the issues at the heart of such debates—displacement, identity, and contact with the unfamiliar—are far from new. This dissertation asks how encounters with foreign others shaped how early modern French writers portrayed France. It examines accounts by Jean de Léry, René Goulaine de Laudonnière, and Samuel de Champlain to investigate how narrations of encounters with Indigenous populations in the Americas influenced French self-understanding from the mid-sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries. Drawing from psychoanalysis and postcolonial studies, I define identity-formation as a process of disseminating ideas about how a group’s practices unite members and distance them from outsiders, and I demonstrate how this process is at work in Léry’s, Laudonnière’s, and Champlain’s accounts. Léry’s detailed analyses of Indigenous ways of living use outsiders to show a French society united by (the potential for) Christianity but divided morally. Laudonnière’s lack of specific information about the Timucua in Florida paradoxically portrays the French as a distinct, clearly-defined cultural community. Champlain describes missionary efforts in Quebec which depict (unrealistic) unity among the French. This analysis can help to understand influences on French identities at a time of great upheaval in France. It also illuminates the role foreigners can play in a society’s self-understanding(s)—a question which remains central in the twenty-first century.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".