Are They Fruits of Ancient or Modern Knowledge? Geographical Discoveries in the Commentary of Heinrich Salmuth to the Treatise of Guido Panciroli “Rerum Memorabilium” (1602)

Abstract

In the 1570s and 1580s, the Italian jurist Guido Panciroli (1523–1599) compiled a collection of brief notes on ancient and new inventions. In one of them, the author put forward the thesis that ancient thinkers knew nothing about the existence of the Americas. In an effort to prove the primacy of the Europeans in the discovery of the New World, Heinrich Salmuth, compiler of the commentary on Panchiroli's notes, made a number of arguments for and against this position. Thus in Panciroli's treatise “New Discoveries, or Two Books of Venerable Things”, first published in 1602, together with a commentary by Salmuth and initiated by the latter, the question of the possibility of discovering America before Columbus was raised. The purpose of this paper is to analyse grounds on which the time and essence of the discovery of the New World were perceived. To this end, the author examines the logic of the two authors' reasoning about European primacy and the differences in the justifications for this claim. On the basis of the research undertaken, it can be concluded that this work revisits not only the corpus of ancient worldviews, but also the exploratory, creative potential of Europeans to discover a new continent. In their work they try to find an explanation for the break with the preceding tradition and thus find themselves at the origins of the dispute over the significance of ancient knowledge for the new European science.