Description
Book SynopsisThe age of exploration exposed the limits of available universal histories. Everyday interactions with cultures and societies across the globe brought to light a multiplicity of pasts which proved difficult to reconcile with an emerging sense of unity in the world. Among the first to address the questions posed by this challenge were a handful of Renaissance historians. On what basis could they narrate the history of hitherto unknown peoples? Why did the Bible and classical works say nothing about so many visible traces of ancient cultures? And how far was it possible to write histories of the world at a time of growing religious division in Europe and imperial rivalry around the world? A study of the cross-fertilization of historical writing in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, The Globe on Paper reconstructs a set of imaginative accounts worked out from Mexico to the Moluccas and Peru, and from the shops of Venetian printers to the rival courts of Spain and England. The
Trade ReviewThe Globe on Paper is a superb examination of a collection of texts not usually studied together. In this tight, coherent study centered on sixteenth-century writers' attempts to compose unified narratives out of what at first blush seemed a plurality of pasts, Marcocci offers a valuable reinterpretation of some well-known sixteenth-century histories, presenting a new way of reading the subgenre of Renaissance histories of the world, while elucidating the creativity and innovation that characterized the writing of history during the "open Renaissance" of the sixteenth century. * Andrew Devereux, University of California, San Diego, Journal of Modern History *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Introduction: Renaissance Historians and the World 1: Genealogical Histories: Forging Antiquities from New Spain to China 2: Histories in Motion: Thinking Back to the Moluccas in a Lisbon Hospital 3: Indigenous Comparisons: A Renaissance Bestseller in the Colonial Andes 4: Popular Accounts: Printing Histories of the World in Late Renaissance Venice 5: Jesuit Missions and Imperial Rivalries: The Twilight of Histories of the World Conclusions
