The Noble Savage

Stelio Cro's revealing work, arising from his more than half dozen previous books, considers the eighteenth-century Enlightenment in the context of the European experience with, and reaction to, the cultures of America's original inhabitants. Taking into account Spanish, Italian, French, and English sources, the author describes how the building materials for Rousseau's allegory of the Noble Savage came from the early Spanish chroniclers of the discovery and conquest of America, the Jesuit Relations of the Paraguay Missions (a Utopia in its own right), the "Essais" of Montaigne, Italian Humanism, Shakespeare's "Tempest," writers of Spain's Golden Age, Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe," and the European "philosophes."