All the World is a Book: Italian Renaissance Printing in a Global Perspective

One of the most interesting features of Renaissance culture in Italy was its obsession with knowledge about other peoples and their customs. This was likely due to more than just intellectual curiosity. You might even call it an anxiety about wanting to know more about the world beyond the Mediterranean so that “Italians” could understand better their own place and social identity vis-à-vis other peoples and places. How, then, did literature about or from distant lands contribute to shaping identity, inform values, and promote collective self-reflection? After briefly discussing the development and the impact of printing in Italy, I will consider the relationship between texts and material formats in Olaus Magnus’s Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (1555), a work that enjoyed a wide circulation and that described the many marvels of a relatively hitherto unknown part of the world, Scandinavia, to Italian readers. I will then briefly discuss two other books, Nicolàs Monardes’ popular work, Historia medicinal (1565–1569) and Giambattista della Porta’s Magia naturalis (1558) as instances of changing attitudes and practices.