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Stelio Cro’s revealing work, arising from his more than half dozen previous books, considers the eighteenth-century Enlightenment in the context of the European experience with, and reaction to, the cultures of America’s original inhabitants. Taking into account Spanish, Italian, French, and English sources, the author describes how the building materials for Rousseau’s allegory of the Noble Savage came from the early Spanish chroniclers of the discovery and conquest of America, the Jesuit Relations of the Paraguay Missions (a Utopia in its own right), the Essais of Montaigne, Italian Humanism, Shakespeare’s Tempest, writers of Spain’s Golden Age, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and the European philosophes.
Stelio Cro has degrees in Philosophy and Foreign Languages and is a professor in the Department of Modern Languages at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. His interests include the utopian genre and the myths of the discovery and conquest of America and their influence on Western thought. His previous books include the landmark edition of the Spanish utopia Sinapia; an analysis of the life and work of the Italian writer Tommaso Campanella and his Città del Sole; and Realidad y utopia en el descubrimiento y conquista de la América Hispana, 1492—1682.