Giuseppe Marcocci's new book 'The Globe on Paper'

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Giuseppe Marcocci’s new book, The Globe on Paper: Writing Histories of the World in Renaissance Europe and the Americas (OUP, 2020), investigates the imaginative solutions that a variety of authors devised to rethink world history in the age of the first global interaction. Link to publisher's website.

Based on extensive research into manuscript and printed materials from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this study restores the centrality that knowledge of the past had in the relationship among different parts of the world. While delving into the original questions that Renaissance world historians asked to a wide range of sources, Dr Marcocci explores the circulation of distinctive modes of historical writing across multiple languages and regions, the many ways in which they influenced each other, the transformation they experienced in different contexts, as well as the challenge they posed to the authority of religion and empire.

Giuseppe Marcocci is Associate Professor in Iberian History at Exeter College. He works on the history of early modern global interaction, with special reference to the Portuguese and Spanish empires and the political, religious, and cultural dynamics that shaped their colonial societies.