Irony and Toleration: Lessons from the Travels of Mendes Pinto

Abstract

Rebecca Catz argues that Fernao Mendes Pinto's «Peregrination», a sprawling account of travels in the East first published in 1614, is a «plea for toleration». Richard Rorty says that irony is a good mode for postmodern intellectual life. But attention to the text suggests «that Mendes Pinto provided» a much more subtle and nihilistic irony than Rorty imagines, and that his text is a plea for toleration in only the most attenuated sense.