Redefining the Cosmos: Voyages

Catalog description

The Italian Renaissance has traditionally been understood as the very laboratory of Modernity. In a time where new and revolutionary ideas about art, politics and science took shape, Europe faced an extraordinary challenge: how to integrate into "the Renaissance experiment" the new natural and human experience that opened up with the discovery of the New World. Italy produced an extraordinarily heterogeneous body of work that stemmed from these voyages: that is, a "literature of discovery." This course will explore this literature, which includes epic poems, popular cantari, travelogues, historical and geographical treatises, as well as epistolary collections.