This chapter challenges the pervasive notion in the current historiography that the European inability to recognise the uniqueness and difference of the Americas in the sixteenth century was the product of an inflexible and monolithic early modern mind. In contrast, this chapter contends that Old World frameworks of knowledge were concsiously employed by English writers to justify their explorative and colonial approaches to the New World, rather than an unconcious reflection of their own incapability to recognise American difference. In doing so, this chapter argues that English explorers and writers viewed the new American lands selectively, seeing not what was really there, but what was most advantageous to the political, economic, cultural, and colonial aims of the viewer. This type of ‘selective appopriation’ shaped early English understandings of the New World and helped to define and validate sixteenth-century English colonial decisions.

The conclusion synthesises the main arguments of the book and what this means for the historiography of early America. It concludes by suggesting that the English approach to settlement and colonialism in the New World at the turn of the seventeenth century was the result of decades of translating and transforming images of America that first came from continental Europe, of utilising and adapting intellectual and cultural frameworks of understanding to explain the existence of this new and shockingly different world, of experiencing and responding to both English colonial failure and success, and of incorporating the peoples and environments of America into the mental world of early modern England in an attempt to persuade English men and women to make the difficult decision to cross the Atlantic in search of a new life. It was in the sixteenth century that the English first grappled with what the discovery of 1492 meant for them, both in terms of how they came to understand and define the new lands across the Atlantic and how they came to craft their own colonial approach that would challenge their rivals and restore the English realm to economic and political health. The sixteenth-century English involvement with America, although at times sporadic and limited to a small group of interested parties, was foundational, establishing and defining the ways in which English colonialism would proceed in the New World.

Through an investigation into the role played by diet in English overseas projects, chapter four argues that corporeality was vital to the formation and dissemination of English representations of America. Eating and the effect of food on the body became, when placed in an American context, indicative of successful and profitable ventures or unsuccessful and troublesome ones. English ideas about the human body and how it functioned in different environments were integral to the encounter between England and America. This bodily discourse allowed for the defence of failed attempts at settlement, the celebration of English explorative and colonial projects as providential, and for the establishment of a set of beliefs about the American environment that had ideas about food and the body at its centre.

This chapter examines the multi-faceted English understandings of both Indigenous clothing and nakedness, analysing the various ways that English explorers, writers, and translators described the appearances of the diverse groups of Indigenous people that they encountered. In doing so this chapter argues that descriptions of Indigenous clothing and nakedness in English print varied throughout the sixteenth century and performed a variety of functions, from shaping English approaches to trade and colonisation in the New World, to informing and framing moral and religious debates taking place back home, through reflecting shared European cultural values. Everyday practices of dressing, and English perceptions of Indigenous bodies, were thus central to the articulation of English colonialism in the sixteenth century.

Cohen was first known as a poet, and on the basis of his first volume of poetry he was described as Canada’s leading poet. As the 1965 documentary Ladies and Gentleman, Mr. Leonard Cohen attests, he became a celebrity in Canada on the basis of his poetry even before he had recorded an album. He continued to publish poetry throughout his career, and the relationship of the poems to the lyrics is interesting and complicated. Cohen’s early poetry is more modernist, largely eschewing rhyme or regular rhythm, while his later poems are often similar to his lyrics. Poetry inhabits both novels in various ways. Lawrence Breavman enjoys a first name that nods to and withdraws Lawrentian possibilities, and the strategies of the poet are all over Beautiful Losers: repetition, anaphora, listing, grammatical and syntactical dislocation, a variety of forms, symbolism, making strange, surrealism. Sometimes, Cohen publishes his song lyrics as poems, sometimes verbatim, sometimes in a different form. Other poems are quite different from his songs set to music, yet he seems to have thought of his poems and lyrics collectively as “songs.”

Cohen was born and raised in the Westmont neighborhood of Montreal, where his family had lived for several generations. Cohen’s first artistic community was the literary one in and around McGill University in Montreal where he took his bachelor’s degree. In The Favourite Game, it is reported that “Some say that no one ever leaves Montreal, for that city, like Canada itself, is designed to preserve the past.” One critic has remarked of that novel that the problem with its protagonist, Lawrence Breavman, is that he can’t let go of anything, and since Breavman is like his creator in most things, it’s hard not to read the line quoted above as self-referential as well. Cohen, like Breavman, “fled the city,” but he always returned, indeed even to his mother’s house before she died. Cohen’s songs may not very often be literally about or set in Montreal, but they are of that place, just as the Beatles’ songs are of Liverpool. This chapter explores Montreal as a source and context for Cohen’s work.

Cohen did not shy away from autobiography in his work, and so his fans may have a sense that they already know his life story. Yet, except for his novel The Favourite Game, Cohen’s work typically makes unexplained references to his personal history rather than to narrate episodes of it. In order to provide a frame for the more particular aspects his life featured in later chapters, this chapter will offer an essayistic overview of Cohen’s life from his boyhood in the Westmont neighborhood of Montreal, to the Greek island of Hydra and the Chelsea Hotel, through his stays at Zen Monastery on Mt. Baldy, to his triumphant late tours necessitated by his manager’s theft. Along the way, Cohen encountered and was influenced by lovers, poets, other songwriters, and religious teachers, not to mention the family into which he was born and the more disparate one that he fathered.

In 1969, Franco Zeffirelli invited Cohen to Italy to discuss scoring his film Brother Sun, Sister Moon. The collaboration did not advance, but in 1971 German director Rainer Fassbinder used Cohen’s songs for Beware the Holy Whore. A few years later, Robert Altman chose to use four songs from Cohen’s first album for the soundtrack of McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), for which Cohen also wrote some new material that Altman did not use. Since then, Cohen’s songs have been used in over 300 films and TV episodes. Roger Young’s Kiss the Sky (1998) includes eight Cohen songs on the soundtrack, and the film echoes themes that run throughout Cohen’s work. Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz (2011) was inspired by Cohen’s song. “Hallelujah” has been used prominently in numerous films and television episodes, including Shrek, The West Wing, and Saturday Night Live. Cohen was also directly involved in the production of several films, including I Am a Hotel (1983), which features the surreal interactions of several sets of lovers at a hotel. This chapter explores the relationship of Cohen’s music and lyrics to these films and assess their role in his career.

When his manager stole most of his wealth, Cohen was forced to go back out on the road at the age of seventy-three. The result was the beginning of a triumphant last chapter in his storied career. While rockers in the 1960s often proclaimed that they couldn’t imagine themselves continuing into their fifties or sixties, many have continued well beyond that. The Rolling Stones, of whom the youngest remaining member is seventy-four, just completed a well-received tour of the United States. But the Stones and most other older performers do not present themselves as old. Mick Jagger continues to prance around the stage with almost as much energy as he exhibited in his twenties. Cohen, on the contrary, performed on these late tours honestly and gracefully as a septuagenarian. Some of this is consistent with the persona he has displayed since the 1960s, for example dressing in the style of the previous generation. But the new Cohen was not just conservatively dressed. He directly confronted the limitations of age in his stage patter, and his songs, which had always taken account of death, now took on a new resonance, as it was apparent that the singer’s days were numbered. Where other old rockers seem to assume that they deserve the audience’s adoration, Cohen was humble and grateful for the renewed interest in his work. This chapter explores what it means for a rock star to present himself as an old man, a persona that challenges some of the fundamental assumptions about what a rock star is.

Unlike Bob Dylan, Cohen was never a protest singer. Indeed, it is difficult to find clearly articulated political positions anywhere in his work, and he frequently expressed the wish to not take sides. Yet Cohen has often referred to the songs of the Spanish Civil War and socialist folk singers as early influences. Cohen’s work does address political issues, and it can be read as articulating political positions regardless of the artist’s claims. Cohen often found himself in the middle of political strife, from Havana in the early years of Castro’s revolution to the Arab–Israeli conflicts. Songs like “First We Take Manhattan,” “Democracy,” and “Everybody Knows” offer political critique, even if they don’t endorse any program – and not choosing sides is also a political position. This chapter assesses the political valences and import of Cohen’s work and persona.