Giuseppe Marcocci (University of Oxford), “Books in the Antipodes: Rethinking Libraries and Global Knowledge Across the Oceans”

This talk deals with the place of books and libraries in the production of global knowledge in the early sixteenth century. In particular, it explores the intersection of the world’s shifting image in the eyes of its inhabitants and the growing variety of unfamiliar objects that Europeans physically encountered around the globe and acknowledged as “books.” Their exclusion from Renaissance universal libraries raises doubts about the extent to which such terms as “universal” and “global” should be used interchangeably when it comes to the relationship between libraries and knowledge.

About the Speaker

Giuseppe Marcocci is Professor of Early Modern Global History at the University of Oxford. His research has mostly focused on the historical experience of those who lived in the global empires of Spain and Portugal during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Large part of his work is concerned with issues of power relations as diffracted through sources and materials produced at a time of change, instability, and weak legitimacy. He is also strongly interested in reconsidering established interpretations of early modern epistemologies from alternative geographies and perspectives. His latest book The Globe on Paper: Writing Histories of the World in Renaissance Europe and the Americas (2020) traces how overseas exploration transformed historical writing across the Atlantic and beyond. He is currently completing the first monograph on the Lisbon massacre of 1506 and collaborating with Professor Jorge Flores (University of Lisbon) on a book project about visual dissent in Iberian colonial society.