Comparative/World
tions—rapidly gives way to a Bakhtinian or Benjamin-
ian reading of it. But these caveats are a matter of one’s
cup of tea, and not of quality, which in Papailias’ book
is consistently high. Her book is itself a new genre, and
marks an important, quirky contribution to several dis-
ciplines at once.
K. E. FLEMING
New York University
COMPARATIVE/WORLD
GORDON M. SAYRE. The Indian Chief as Tragic Hero:
Native Resistance and the Literatures of America, from
Moctezuma to Tecumseh. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press. 2005. Pp. x, 357. Cloth $55.00,
paper $22.50.
How is it that Indian “chiefs” like Metacom and Pon-
tiac, once despised as devious inhuman foes, have
ended up as celebrated and revered heroes? The ques-
tion has tantalized historians, whose explanations in-
clude the time-honored practice of idealizing the en-
emy for the sake of self-glorification. It is a form of
boasting to raise your defeated enemy to the status of
superhero. There is also the less-than-conscious wish of
conquerors in wars of aggression to assuage guilt, es-
pecially when victory includes genocide and appropri-
ation of the foe’s homeland. With impressive erudition
and insight Gordon M. Sayre’s book challenges such
older explanations by recasting ambivalence as a sign of
a new cultural amalgam of mixed white and native or-
igin. The conquering culture projected its own values
and wishes on symbolic enemies it called “chiefs,” while
natives absorbed enough Western culture, especially
religion and politics, to make the projection plausible.
“Indian chiefs” get to be “tragic heroes” as a result of
reciprocal mimesis, each side mimicking and adopting
elements of the other’s ways.
Covering events and figures over three centuries of
white-Indian relations, Sayre locates his story on “the
middle ground,” a conceptual turf where Europeans
and natives produce a third thing, the imagination if not
the full realization of a blended or hybrid culture of
mutuality. “Middle ground” implies a process whose
foremost sign, in Sayre’s narrative, is the Indian whose
conferred status as “chief” and whose defeated aspi-
ration to prevail over fate qualifies him, in the eyes of
the conquerors who thereby bring their own cultural
inheritance to bear, as “tragic.” It is a subtle and at its
best a powerful argument. Sayre concedes that Indian
versions of “intercultural” experience remain un-
plumbed largely because of the formidable gap between
the oral and the written, but an idea of “middle ground”
recoprocity informs the entire book.
Extraordinarily rich in narrative detail and historical
allusion, the book is predominantly a literary study. It
treats seven moments of “resistance” from Moctezuma
and Cuauhtemoc in sixteenth-century Mexico to Meta-
com in seventeenth century New England and Pontiac
and Tecumseh in the late eighteenth and early nine-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
161
teenth centuries in the upper United States and in Can-
ada. The primary concern is how certain historical fig-
ures and events have been depicted in epic poetry,
drama, fiction, biography, memoir, and historical and
ethnological narrative, and to some extent in visual im-
agery: depicted and reconstructed as “the white man’s
Indian” but also as tokens of reciprocal desire. While
each chapter mounts an abundantly detailed scenario of
setting and act, the main focus is on principles and
modes of the representations. Drawing from René Gi-
rard on rituals of sacrifice and “mimetic rivalry,” Hay-
den White on “emplotment” of historical events, Rich-
ard White on “the middle ground” as a historical form
of sociality, and of course Aristotle on tragedy, Sayre
fashions a supple instrument of literary analysis and in-
terpretation. Sometimes it may feel as if the book gets
bogged down in its own abundance of fact and theory,
but the cogency of the argument survives its occasional
verbosity.
Fascinating particulars regarding each episode of re-
sistance fill the book with recollections of perceived
tragic heroism by writers who were there at the events
they describe, like Hernán Cortés and William Henry
Harrison, or by writers who constructed their narratives
and fictions from archives and lore, like historian Fran-
cis Parkman and the dramatist John Augustus Stone
(Metamora). Stories of battles with Indians provided
primary entertainment and intended enlightenment
about “civilization” then and since, and dramatic death
scenes of many an “Indian chief” made many a literary
career, especially during the “craze” for Indian dramas
and novels in the 1830s. Also fascinating and important
is the book’s hemispheric and comparativist scope.
Sayre shows skillfully that a similar logic appears in
Spanish and French as in English texts. His book makes
a major effort to underscore parallels north and south
in uses of the Indian figure to support of revolutionary
anticolonial and republican ideals in virtually coeval na-
tionalizing moments of Mexico, Canada, and the
United States.
Some readers may find the argument too weighted
down with “theory,” also with too frequent prolepses
like “as we shall see.” You cannot always tell the forest
from the trees. But the book deserves the most serious
attention not only for its breadth and depth of detail but
for its historiographical argument about the value of
literary study to historical understandings. The book
complicates its opening question about demonized foes
turned into redemptive heroes and challenges histori-
ans to reexamine fundamental assumptions about pop-
ular uses of the trope of “the Indian chief,” one of
American culture’s archly over-determined artifacts.
Why the need for tragic heroes, and why Indians? How
did the tragic “chief” relate to the African slave? Sayre
offers a compelling brief comparison with the Denmark
Vesey rebellion. He argues that by the early republic
representations of the sacrificial “other” and the semi-
magical “Indian chief” helped construct a race-based
ideological rationale for the nation. The book lays down
FEBRUARY 2007
162 Reviews of Books
a robust challenge to historians to pursue these ques-
tions further with comparable subtlety and learning.
ALAN TRACHTENBERG
Yale University
NEIL KAMIL. Fortress of the Soul: Violence, Metaphysics,
and Material Life in the Huguenots’ New World, 1517–
1751. (Early America: History, Context, Culture.) Bal-
timore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2005. Pp. xxiv,
1058. $75.00.
This is an ambitious, unsettling, initially stimulating,
but ultimately tedious and unconvincing book. Over a
thousand pages long, it ranges across the cultural and
intellectual history of early modern Europe and North
America, connecting (or claiming to connect) the meta-
physics of sixteenth-century Paracelsianism to the fur-
niture made by craftsmen of Huguenot origin in sev-
enteenth and eighteenth-century New England and
New York. Essential to the connection is the fact that
many of the Huguenot joiners active in the American
colonies hailed from the province of Saintonge, home
during the first generation of the French Reformation
to the potter-alchemist-architect-author Bernard Pal-
issy. Palissy, in turn, is the central figure in the first third
of the book, which offers an extended reading of his
oeuvre and presents him as the founder and ur-expos-
itor of a distinctive tradition of rural Saintongeais ar-
tisan Protestantism, heavily inflected by pietism and
Paracelsianism, that parted company with orthodox
Calvinism in permitting believers to dissimulate their
deepest convictions and in encouraging a focus on in-
ward spiritual transformation. This world view, Neil
Kamil suggests, was passed down to subsequent gen-
erations of artisans from the region, who found it par-
ticularly appealing in times of persecution.
The book does not move in a straight line from Pal-
issy to colonial leather side chairs and the joinery of the
Friends Meetinghouse in Flushing, New York. Kamil
also discerns important echoes of Palissy’s world view
in the ideas and activities of John Winthrop, Jr., Robert
Fludd, Kenelm Digby, William Hogarth, the Huguenot
galérien Elias Neau, the anonymous artist who engraved
a view of Neau for the 1749 London edition of A Short
Account of [His] Life and Sufferings, and even Menoc-
chio and Jacques-Louis Ménétra. Extended hermeneu-
tic riffs on texts or objects made by these figures or by
colonial North American craftsmen alternate with
briefer sections that contextualize them. (One chapter
devotes fully 145 pages to a single painting by Hogarth,
Noon, L’Eglise des Grecs, Hog Lane, Soho.) The best
way to convey the author’s main argument—and the
character of his prose—is to cut and paste from the first
three pages of the book. “Beginning with the French
civil wars of religion in the 1550s, Huguenot artisans
from the southwestern regional culture that supplied
the vast majority of French refugee craftsmen and
women to New Amsterdam and New York in the sev-
enteenth century mastered an apocalyptic shift from
the corporate and militaristic ‘place of security’—epit-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
omized by the massive, immobile (and hence militarily
vulnerable) medieval fortress system protecting La
Rochelle—to a reformed program of protection based
on the skills construction of portable and individualistic
modes of personal security, deployed mostly in domes-
tic space.” This artisanal security was rooted in mastery
of manual skills and natural materials and deeply in-
formed by models of Paracelsian natural philosophy.
“This program also promoted natural camouflage
through personal and religious dissimulation, inner
spiritual knowledge of local earth materials, and socio-
economic and spiritual cooperation across confessions
and especially refugee groups exiled by persecution.”
New York became the site of “social, cultural, eco-
nomic and spiritual interaction between Huguenot ar-
tisanal networks and the many other Protestant, spir-
itualist, and artisanal traditions that developed in
similar New World historiographies based on experi-
ence of religious violence, enlarging an international
process of soulish convergence.”
Kamil is at moments a gifted expositor of unfamiliar
world views. He convincingly shows that Paracelsian
themes were more widely diffused in sixteenth and early
seventeenth-century French and English culture than
historians unfamiliar with this tradition are likely to
have suspected. But he does not successfully establish
that a common, well-articulated outlook consistently
informed the texts and artifacts he examines. His read-
ings of individual paintings, prints, and pieces of fur-
niture often seem forced and unconvincing. His prose
can be strained and difficult. And while the book ranges
across an incredibly broad range of topics, its treatment
of the topic I know best, Old World Huguenot culture,
contains enough small misunderstandings to sap my
faith in the author’s mastery of the rest of the topics he
examines as well. What is one to make of the sentence
“Everyone adumbrated the economic historian Warren
Scoville’s primary assertion of the baneful effect of re-
ligious persecution on French economic development”
(p. 545), when the chief argument of Scoville’s The Per-
secution of the Huguenots and French Economic Devel-
opment (1960) was that the revocation of the Edict of
Nantes was not as harmful to the French economy as
previously thought? To call the royal siege of La Roch-
elle of 1628–1629 “confessional genocide” (p. 409) is
overheated. While many French Protestant families
certainly possessed copies of the Beza-Marot psalter,
François Perrin’s printer’s mark of the narrow and wide
gate only appears on the title page of one among many
editions that circulated, and so can hardly be deemed
the “most familiar [image] in Huguenot culture” (p.
624, Fig. 14.16). Examples such as these could be mul-
tiplied. On first picking up this book I was excited and
challenged by its vast ambition and bold thesis. By the
end I was laboring to finish it.
PHILIP BENEDICT
University of Geneva
FEBRUARY 2007