Hans Staden and the Protestant Captivity Narrative: The Origins and Fractured Legacy of a New Literary Genre

Abstract

Virtually all discussions of Hans Staden’s famous True History (1557) have focused on the cannibalistic aspects of his tale. This article argues that 1) the religious language throughout his account is not incidental but rather indicative of the main purpose of his writing: proselytizing about personal conversion and divine providence; 2) the profound similarity of this early version of the Protestant captivity narrative to its much better known New England version a century later suggests a hitherto hidden influence, either direct or indirect; 3) in this focus on individual conversion, the New World descriptions of non-colonizing German Lutherans differed considerably from the imperially-driven missionary agendas of other European Protestants abroad.