2016 - Travel, Monsters, and Taxidermy: the Semiotic Patterns of Gullibility (original) (raw)

At the beginning of modernity, the European exploration and colonization of the world raised a both cognitive and communicational problem: how to transmit to the readership of the Old Continent the idea of the exotic nature that was discovered in the eastern and in the western “Indies”? Confronted with this issue, the rhetoric of the early modern European traveler deployed all sorts of signs, discourses, and texts meant to evoke in their receivers a double effect of meaning, paradoxically combining a feeling of verisimilitude and one of marvel. The comparative analysis of words, images, and indexes of this rhetoric bears on a both theoretical and historical issue. In it, one can read, between the lines, the progressive elaboration of the modern European episteme, wherein signs of different types organize in alternative ways the relation between reality and meaning, truth and verisimilitude. The early modern representation of ‘monsters’, in particular, inherits the previous abundant tradition of ancient and medieval depiction of monstrousness, yet it frames it within a new rhetorical context, which bestows credibility to words, and especially to images, by exploiting the semiotic rules of referentialization that still dominate the current rhetoric of veridiction.