La langue de l’île d’Utopie : les Indes orientales vues des Flandres à la Renaissance

Vielle, Christophe
(2013) Acta Orientalia Belgica — Vol. 26, p. 19-34 (2013)

Files

LalanguedelîledUtopielesIndesorientalesvuesdesFlandresàlaRenaissance.pdf
  • Open Access
  • Adobe PDF
  • 1.36 MB
Download

Details

Authors
Abstract
“The language of the Island of Utopia: East Indies viewed from Flanders during the Renaissance” deals with Belgian people involved in the rediscovery of India in the late 15th-early 16th centuries. The reaching of Calicut (Kerala, South India) inspired the imaginations in the Low Countries, as exemplified by the Tournai tapestry. In the city of Antwerp, which at that time played a central role in the Portuguese trade with East Indies, two among the oldest reports on the Malabar Coast were printed (1504, 1508). The humanist Pieter Gillis, Thomas More’s close friend who belonged to that city, may be considered as the author of the poem in the Utopian alphabet and language added at the opening of the first editions (1516, 1518) of More’s Utopia. A new linguistic analysis of this ‘pre-Orientalist’ philological play shows echoes of Indian languages like Sanskrit and Malayāḷam. Samples of the latter are also documented in a few other European writings of that time.
Affiliations

Citations

  • APA
  • Chicago
  • FWB

Vielle, C. (2013). La langue de l’île d’Utopie : les Indes orientales vues des Flandres à la Renaissance. Acta Orientalia Belgica, 26, 19-34. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/28298 (Original work published 2013)