Troubling Meat: Calvinism, the Food Chain, and Identity-Informed Hermeneutics in Jean de Léry

ABSTRACT: This article puts Jean de Léry’s experiences as a Calvinist refugee in Brazil into dialogue with modern discourses of biodiversity and deep ecology. Taking an “early/modern” stance in the vein of Carla Freccero and employing an analytical tool that I call “identity-informed hermeneutics,” this analysis considers how Léry’s Calvinist identity influences his depictions of nature in Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil (1578). Through his encounters with carnivores and the meat-based distress they provoke, and through awe at natural diversity, Léry comes to see nature in a new, but still faith-based light that speaks to twenty-first-century realities.