Term 2 Week 3: Discovering the World
Seminar Questions
- How did Italians represent themselves and others in print?
- Did access to more texts and images about other parts of the world change the way that Italians thought about themselves and their own communities?
- How did print allow Italy to be 'consumed' by travellers in new ways?
Essential Reading
- Melissa Calaresu, "Costumes and Customs in Print: Travel, Ethnography, and the Representation of Street-Sellers in Early Modern Italy", in R. Harms et al (eds), Not Dead Things: The Dissemination of Popular Print in England, Wales, Italy and the Low Countries 1500-1820 (Brill, 2013), 181-210.
- Selections from Margaret F. Rosenthal and Ann Rosalind Jones (ed. and trans.), The clothing of the Renaissance world: Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas: Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti Antichi et Moderni (London, 2008) (RP)
- Elizabeth Horodowich, “Armchair Travellers and the Venetian Discovery of the New World”, Sixteenth Century Journal 36/4 (2005): 1039-1062.
- Selected maps and images of Renaissance Rome from Lafreri's Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae
Further Reading
- Ann Rosalind Jones, "'Worn in Venice and Throughout Italy': The Impossible Present in Cesare Vecellio's Costume Books," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 39, no. 3 (2009): 511-44.
- Kathryn Blair Moore, "The Disappearance of an Author and the Emergence of a Genre: Niccolò da Poggibonsi and Pilgrimage Guidebooks between Manuscript and Print", Renaissance Quarterly, 66/2 (2013): 357-411.
- Bronwen Wilson “Foggie diverse di vestire de’Turchi”: Turkish costume illustration and cultural translation”, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern History (2007): 95-138.
- Eugenia Paulicelli, "The Political Geography of Dress in Cesare Vecellio's Costume Books", The Italianist 28 (2008): 24-53.
- Jacopo Sansovino, Venetia citta’ nobilissima et singolare (Bergamo, 2002).
- Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London, 2006).
- Cesare Vecellio, Vecellio's Renaissance costume book: all 500 woodcut illustrations from the famous sixteenth-century compendium of world costume (New York, 1977)
- Peter Burke, "Early modern Venice as a center of information and communication", in John Martin and Dennis Romano (eds), Venice reconsidered: the history and civilisation of an Italian city-state, 1297 - 1799 (Baltimore, 2000), 390-408.
- Peter Burke, 'Did Europe exist before 1700?', History of European Ideas 1 (1980): 21-29.
- Amanda Wunder, "Western Travelers, Eastern Antiquities and the Image of the Turk in Early Modern Europe", Journal of Early Modern History 7, 1-2 (2003):
- Paul F. Grendler, "Francesco Sansovino and Italian Popular History 1560 - 1600", Studies in the Renaissance 16 (1969): 139 - 80.
- John M. Headley, "The Sixteenth-Century Venetian Celebration of the Earth's Total Habitability: The Issue of the Fully Habitable World for Renaissance Europe", Journal of World History 8/1 (1997): 1-27.
- Joan-Pau Rubiés, Travel and ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European eyes, 1250-1625 (Cambridge, 2000).
- Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven, 2010), chapter 13.
- Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature (New York, 1998).
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Stephanie Leitch, Mapping Ethnography in Early Modern Germany: New Worlds in Print
Culture (Basingstoke, 2010).
- Edward Wilson Lee, The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World's Greatest Library (New York, 2018).
Web Resources
- Colonization and Print in the Americas
- The Itinerary of Ludovico di Varthema of Bologna - full text of a famous book of travels printed in this period.
- Benedetto Bordon, Isolario (Island Book)
- Bartolomeo dalli Sonetti, Isolario (Venice, before 1485) - an early island book, in verse.
- Leandro Alberti, Description of all of Italy (Bologna, 1550).
- Vecellio.net - The Works of Cesare Vecellio
- Matteo Ricci, The Art of Printing in China
- The Nuremberg Chronicle - the famous encyclopedic work online, with images and translations
- Archive of early American printed images from the John Carter Brown Library
- Omnium pene Europae, Asiae, Aphricae atque Americae gentium habitus - sixteenth-century book of costume engravings by Abraham de Bruyn.
- Giacomo Franco, Habiti d'houmeni et donne Venetiane... - some images from the famous costume book.
- Girolamo Benzoni, The History of the New World (Venice, 1572) - account by a traveller from Milan.
- Narrating the Myth of Venice Through Maps, Graphs and Timelines - site with some of the early printed images of Venice.