‘Le naufrage de ce mortel monde’

Abstract

Over the course of the sixteenth century, the Old French word for ship—‘nef’—gradually fell out of use, being replaced by ‘navire’ and ‘vaisseau’. This chapter explores an important strand of this story; the persistence of a symbolic, literary ‘nef’, whose origins can be traced from medieval tradition through to the first decade of the sixteenth century. A mini-genre, the Nef book, capitalized on the popularity of Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff, and over the course of just a few years, this genre developed and changed, generating de-nauticalized compendia on a range of subjects. These compendia are significant with respect to (among other things) the beginnings of the commonplace book; two of the authors examined in this chapter (Jodocus Badius and Symphorien Champier), played important roles in the emergence of this tradition. Shipwreck often represents the fate of the sinner’s soul, but as the concerns of the Nef books become more worldly, and less spiritual, partly by contact with the Fürstenspiegel (mirrors for princes) tradition, so too the significance of shipwrecks shifts; the prospect of bodily shipwreck, in particular, comes increasingly to the fore. Besides identifying and analysing this previously neglected family of books, this chapter sheds light on several important conventions that will continue to inform the dynamics of shipwreck throughout the century. In particular, it shows that seafaring was the subject both of curiosity and of moral anxiety; it is this tension that makes the family of Nef books a particularly rich cluster of texts with which to open this study of shipwreck.