The Globe on Paper: Writing Histories of the World in Renaissance Europe and the Americas, by Giuseppe Marcocci, tr. Richard Bates

Abstract

This book is a revised and reworked translation of a book published by Giuseppe Marcocci in 2016 under the enigmatic title Indios, cinesi, falsari. The author is quite a prolific scholar, who trained at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. Like many Italian historians of the early modern period, he has a solid foundation in classical Greek and Latin and reads and researches widely in the Romance languages. He has several book-length publications in Italian and Portuguese, notably on the Inquisition and the Portuguese empire, but none of these has yet been translated into English. This book is thus a very welcome addition to the English-language library of works by Italian scholars. The book is made up of five quite compact chapters, preceded by a brief but essential introduction (16 pages), and followed by a short conclusion (5 pages). It weighs in at just over 200 pages, a modest...