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Expanding Knowledge, Exploring Empire: Constructing Credibility among English and French Readers of the Natural History and Geography of North America, 1673-1763

Year: 2024
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This dissertation tracks the construction of scientific and intellectual credibility for authors who wrote about the history, natural history, and geography of Canada and Louisiana in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries for readers in the transatlantic French and British empires. The study investigates the relevance of credibility and credit to the development of expertise and authors' authority for reading audiences of the period. My task is to reconstruct the “print environment,” the unique circumstances in which the books were created, sold, read, and debated. That history shows that authorial credibility was negotiated and renegotiated based on the needs, opinions, and circumstances of readers more than on any objective measure of an author’s knowledge, expertise, or truthfulness. The dissertation is organized in six in-depth case studies of authors networked together. Each chapter looks at how different authors’ credibility was constructed and contested, affecting his reputation and, ultimately, his legacy. Consideration of the reception and use of authors’ works facilitates a critical investigation of how credibility was negotiated in a growing public sphere. The study reveals that authorial credibility, conventionally associated with an intellectual authority determined by neutral standards of scientific disinterestedness, was complicated by challenges of competing economic interests, tense religious divisions, and entrenched opinions about science in a broad, global, and contested Republic of Letters. By critically analyzing natural history books, my study of the publication process offers a unique lens to understand how accepted or expected narratives about indigenous people, female missionaries, or enslaved men and women developed and gained, or failed to gain, traction over time.
DOI: 10.17615/fwme-3d12
Author: Byers, Clare Marie
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W6906688832
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