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Nel Medioevo si credeva davvero che la Terra fosse piatta? Violaine Giacomotto-Charra e Sylvie Nony tracciano la storia di questo luogo comune e cercano di comprenderne la genesi. A partire dalle fonti antiche, questo libro rigoroso e vivace esplora la storia della scienza e del sapere durante il Medioevo e il Rinascimento e si concentra sulla genealogia del mito della Terra piatta per capire perché persista nonostante le evidenze scientifiche contrarie. Una riflessione, non priva di umorismo, su come le idee errate possono resistere nel tempo e sul modo in cui le credenze si diffondono nella società.

New Diplomatic History has turned into one of the most dynamic and innovative areas of research – especially with regard to early modern history. It has shown that diplomacy was not as homogenous as previously thought. On the contrary, it was shaped by a multitude of actors, practices and places. The handbook aims to characterise these different manifestations of diplomacy and to contextualise them within ongoing scientific debates. It brings together scholars from different disciplines and historiographical traditions.The handbook deliberately focuses on European diplomacy – although non-European areas are taken into account for future research – in order to limit the framework and ensure precise definitions of diplomacy and its manifestations. This must be the prerequisite for potential future global historical perspectives including both the non-European and the European world.

A reframing of how scientific knowledge was produced in the early modern world.Winner of the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize by the Renaissance Society of America, Shortlisted for the Pfizer Award by the History of Science SocietyMany accounts of the scientific revolution portray it as a time when scientists disciplined knowledge by first disciplining their own behavior. According to these views, scientists such as Francis Bacon produced certain knowledge by pacifying their emotions and concentrating on method. In The Interlopers, Vera Keller rejects this emphasis on discipline and instead argues that what distinguished early modernity was a navigation away from restraint and toward the violent blending of knowledge from across society and around the globe.Keller follows early seventeenth-century English'projectors'as they traversed the world, pursuing outrageous entrepreneurial schemes along the way. These interlopers were developing a different culture of knowledge, one that aimed to take advantage of the disorder created by the rise of science and technological advances. They sought to deploy the first submarine in the Indian Ocean, raise silkworms in Virginia, and establish the English slave trade. These projectors developed a culture of extreme risk-taking, uniting global capitalism with martial values of violent conquest. They saw the world as a riskscape of empty spaces, disposable people, and unlimited resources.By analyzing the disasters—as well as a few successes—of the interlopers she studies, Keller offers a new interpretation of the nature of early modern knowledge itself. While many influential accounts of the period characterize European modernity as a disciplining or civilizing process, The Interlopers argues that early modernity instead entailed a great undisciplining that entangled capitalism, colonialism, and science.

Why devote a Companion to the'mirrors for princes', whose very existence is debated? These texts offer key insights into political thoughts of the past. Their ambiguous, problematic status further enhances their interest. And although recent research has fundamentally challenged established views of these texts, until now there has been no critical introduction to the genre. This volume therefore fills this important gap, while promoting a global historical perspective of different “mirrors for princes” traditions from antiquity to humanism, via Byzantium, Persia, Islam, and the medieval West. This Companion also proposes new avenues of reflection on the anchoring of these texts in their historical realities. Contributors are Makram Abbès, Denise Aigle, Olivier Biaggini, Hugo Bizzarri, Charles F. Briggs, Sylvène Edouard, Jean-Philippe Genet, John R. Lenz, Louise Marlow, Cary J. Nederman, Corinne Peneau, Stéphane Péquignot, Noëlle-Laetitia Perret, Günter Prinzing, Volker Reinhardt, Hans-Joachim Schmidt, Tom Stevenson, Karl Ubl, and Steven J. Williams.

Global issues such as climate change and the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis have spurred interest in thinking about the history of the modern economy that goes beyond disciplinary economic history. This book contributes to the cultural history of capitalism and its different regimes of productivity by pursuing the perspective of body history and by providing a global scope. Throughout modernity, the body served as a fundamental, albeit essentially changing, linchpin for both the organization of economic practices and for intellectual reflections on the economy. In particular, it was the pivotal interface to render notions of economic productivity intelligible. The book explores this central thesis in a range of case studies, drawing on source material from West Africa, Europe, Mexico, and the US. Framed by a theoretically informed introduction, which also provides a conceptual history of notions of productivity, and by an afterword that brings the approaches explored in this volume into dialogue with scholarship inspired by Marx and Foucault, the individual chapters tackle the concept of productivity from a wide array of angles, each illuminating the promises and problems of a cultural take on the history of economic productivity.

Italian Academies have typically been studied individually or in the context of specific cities, leaving an important lacuna in the scholarship on Italian culture and early modernity. Cutting across various disciplines, this volume traces the relationships of these Academies and explains how they prefigured networks like the République des letters.