The Globe on Paper: Writing Histories of the World in Renaissance Europe and the Americas

The 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 pages