Frank Lestringant, a leading French scholar and one of the foremost authorities on European encounters with the New World, here gives us a fascinating account of cannibalism and the images it conjured for Europeans from the Renaissance to the late nineteenth century. Drawing on previously unavailable sources, Lestringant describes how European voyagers, intellectuals, divines, and missionaries responded to the unsettling figure of the cannibal and put it to powerful symbolic use.

Beginning with Columbus's "discovery" of New World cannibals, Lestringant pursues his subject through a wide range of imaginative, political, and religious texts. He argues that sixteenth-century travelers and writers turned the "man-eating savage of the America" into a hero who devoured his defeated enemy in accordance with custom - not to satisfy some cruel instinct. Two centuries later, Enlightenment philosophers used the figure of the cannibal in their fight against colonialists and Catholics.

But the positive image of the cannibal suffered a reversal at the end of the eighteenth century, becoming a hateful figure that aroused the primitivist dreams of writers like Sade and Flaubert. Lestringant shows how the cannibal - whether "noble savage" or hateful Other - underlies the mythic thinking of the West.