‘How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe’

 

RHS Lecture

with Caroline Dodds Pennock

held on 13 September 2024

at the Mary Ward House, London, and online

 

 

 

 

Audio and video recordings of the Caroline’s lecture are now available.

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About the event

This lecture follows the trails of some of the many Indigenous people who travelled to France in the early seventeenth century. These travellers are emblematic of a transitional phase of empire when Indigenous visitors to Europe managed to be both spectacularly exotic and utterly unremarkable, normalised in imperial discourse but astounding on European shores. In this lecture, Caroline Pennock reveals both the ubiquity and spectacle of Indigenous peoples in early seventeenth-century France, showing the ways they were influential from the apex of power to the cracks of imperial politics.

About the speaker

Caroline Dodds Pennock is Senior Lecturer in International History at the University of Sheffield. Her first crossover trade book On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe was published in January 2023 and has been warmly received, being selected as one of the best history books of the year by Smithsonian Magazine, The Economist, BBC History Magazine and others. Caroline is probably best known as the only British Aztec historian, and her first book, Bonds of Blood: Gender, Lifecycle and Sacrifice in Aztec Culture (2008, PB: 2011) won the Royal Historical Society’s Gladstone Prize for 2008.