Global Voyages: Navigating the Early Modern World

Catalog description

[Graduate students completing a two-quarter research seminar must enroll in 435A in Winter and 435B in Spring.] This seminar explores global travel, knowledge, curiosity, experience, and understanding, ca. 1500-1800. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a period of global realignments, an age of empires, missionaries, embassies, and trading companies. This seminar takes students around the world, following global travelers, merchants, missionaries, and mapmakers. Students will work extensively with rare books, manuscripts, maps and other artifacts, especially in the Rumsey Map Center to design an exhibit. Urbano Monti's 1587 world map and Francesco Carletti's accidental circumnavigation of the world, 1594-1603, will guide our global voyage, contextualized by sources, artifacts, and histories from many other parts of the world.