| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3 | The History Cooperative

Andrea Frisch. The Invention of the Eyewitness: Witnessing and Testimony in Early Modern France. (North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, number 279.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2004. Pp. 195. $34.95.
Andrea Frisch traces the evolution of the discourse of testimony in medieval and early modern France and attempts to show "that the figure of the eyewitness is a historical construct rather than a philosophical construct" (p. 13). The first portion of the book focuses on law, and especially on "judicial witnesses," who are treated as a central feature of feudal society. Feudal- era witnessing is characterized as dialogic because "compurgators" testified as to the reputation and social standing of the parties, as opposed to early modern and modern "epistemic witinessing" of specific actions and events.	1
A second theme is the role of legal witnessing practices in shaping the figure of the eyewitness in travel writing. Frisch argues that the earlier "ethical" and community-based witnessing persisted in travel writing and was only slowly replaced by eyewitnesses of actual events. Marco Polo was disbelieved as an epistemic witness because of his lack of ethical authority, while John Mandeville was believed because he possessed it. The decline of ethical witnessing and the rise of epistemic witnessing is examined in several early sixteenth-century French accounts of the New World.	. . .

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