Drawing on the concept of “autoethnography” as defined by Mary Louise Pratt, this paper argues that representations of cross-cultural encounter in Renaissance travel narratives often bear striking resemblances to moments of encounter and reunion in Spenserean and Shakespearean romance. Focusing on the trope of linguistic apotheosis which I call the “divine attribution,” the paper discusses various New World ethnographies with respect to specific encountering moments in The Faerie Queene and The Tempest; analysis of these texts suggests that their authors shared habits of ideation conditioned both by literary tradition and by contemporary ethnographic awareness.

গবেষকদের এই কাজটি উদ্ধৃত করতে নিম্নলিখিতভাবে উল্লেখ করতে হবে:

• Hamlin, W. M., (2025), "Making Religion of Wonder: The Divine Attribution in Renaissance Ethnography and Romance", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Hamlin, William M. "Making Religion of Wonder: The Divine Attribution in Renaissance Ethnography and Romance." Renaissance and Reformation 30 (4): 2010. 39-51. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v30i4.11521. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.