Though often read as proto-ethnographic documents, French reformed accounts of the New World reveal their indebtedness to the exoticizing tropes of satiric literature. A growing sensitivity to custom as a function of place and to reformers’ own mobility, both geographical and mental, led to a precocious notion of universality—church could be anywhere one joined one’s hands in prayer. Far from merely disdaining “local” customs, reformers practiced keen forms of observation whose debt to traditional disciplined observance makes them count as a mode of worship, not an anticipation of scientific empiricism. Finally, satiric defamiliarization predisposed French reformers to accept their diasporic destiny.
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