Skip to main content Skip to navigation

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

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).
  • 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