Global Perspectives in Modern Italian Culture: Knowledge and Representation of the World in Italy from the Sixteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century

Description

Global Perspectives in Modern Italian Culture presents a series of unexplored case studies from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, each demonstrating how travellers, scientists, Catholic missionaries, scholars and diplomats coming from the Italian peninsula contributed to understandings of various global issues during the age of early globalization. It also examines how these individuals represented different parts of the world to an Italian audience, and how deeply Italian culture drew inspiration from the increasing knowledge of world ‘Otherness’. The first part of the book focuses on the production of knowledge, drawing on texts written by philosophers, scientists, historians and numerous other first-hand eyewitnesses. The second part analyses the dissemination and popularization of knowledge by focussing on previously understudied published works and initiatives aimed at learned Italian readers and the general public. Written in a lively and engaging manner, this book will appeal to scholars and students of early modern and modern European history, as well as those interested in global history. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Contents List of figures List of contributors Introduction PART I: Confronting world diversity, sixteenth to eighteenth centuries 1. Reason of State and universal history: Boccalini and Botero 2. The idea of Ottoman despotism in the Relazioni of the Venetian ambassadors 3. The Turkish enemy and the eastern European space in Giambattista Vico’s Deeds of Antonio Carafa 4. From the Americas to Rome: Paths of knowledge among the Roman Curia during the seventeenth century 5. Confronting nationalities: Italian Jesuits in China in the late seventeenth century 6. Italian intermediation and knowledge of the languages and cultures of India: The narrative practices regarding the Other in missionaries’ writings 7. The mapmaking of the Italian states: Circulation, transnational debates and geographical networks in the Italian scientific academies during the long eighteenth century 8. A Persian Matteo Ricci: Muh․ammad Zamān’s seventeenth-century translation of De Christiana Expeditione apud Sinas PART II: Representing world diversity, nineteenth to twentieth centuries 9. Representing Asia in Il costume antico e moderno by Giulio Ferrario 10. Voices on China in early nineteenth-century Italian culture (1800–1850) 11. The world seen from Milan: Illustrated travel journals in the nineteenth century 12. Columbus and the others: The historiographic and schoolbook image of the Italian navigators 13. The Atlantic slave trade on Italian shores: The case of the Kingdom of Sardinia (1815–1853) 14. From the banks of the Neva: Italian diplomats and representations of Russia, 1862–1914 15. Antonello Gerbi’s discovery of the New World: Life experience and the practice of history (1938–1948) Index