Abstracts
Antonella Romano
(European University Institute, Florence)
Ordering the globe at the dawn of the early modern period: Jose de Acosta and Antonio Possevino, two worldviews in comparison
This paper sets out to investigate the shaping of comparative history from both a theoretical and empirical perspective. My contribution is based on the analysis of two Jesuit masterpieces of the 1590s, written by two intellectuals, theologians and active participants in the reframing the political map of the Catholic Church’s worldly tasks. Acosta’s Historia natural y moral de las Indias and Possevino’s Bibliotheca selecta are not only two major intellectual attempts to ordering the globe; they can also be considered as two distinct geopolitical constructions of the world based on a twofold comparison: between the present and the past, on the one hand; among the different groups of people around the globe, on the other. Beyond the study of their use of comparison, it will then be possible to discuss their intellectual enterprises as an archeology of “global history”. In conclusion, my scope is to put into a historical perspective the “universal”, the “worldly” and the “global”.
<< Return to the conference programme