The intensity of the relationship of the Calvinist minister Jean de Léry (1534–c. 1613) with cannibalism is absolutely extraordinary. He experienced a number of episodes of either explicit or ‘symbolic’ anthropophagy throughout his lifetime. His reactions to each of these moments represent an extremely interesting ground on which to analyse his perception of violence, food and, especially, his relationship with foreign peoples such as the Tupí and different religious believers such as Catholics during the turbulent second half of the sixteenth century in France. Léry's experiences as an ‘exile's exile’ in Brazil and then again in his own country allow us to explore how an individual managed to explain the world according to values of his time while developing a language better tuned to perceiving and appreciating differences in religion and approaches to toleration.

The Creation of a Stereotype

European accounts of the history of the New World during the first fifty years after the Spanish Conquest are sprinkled with references to cannibalism, and at some points the main stereotyped image of America was that of ‘a cannibal continent’. As Mario Klarer put it: ‘originating in the texts of Columbus and Vespucci, cannibalism not only served as a leitmotif in all major subsequent travel narratives, but also functions as a seemingly irreconcilable counterpart to the utopian setting of the continent’.