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.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• 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/.