Books by Giuseppe Marcocci
This book explores the different forms of the writing of world history in the Renaissance by focu... more This book explores the different forms of the writing of world history in the Renaissance by focusing on the effect of overseas explorations and the first global interactions on the changing perspectives on history. It provides a fresh account that connects peoples and stories from Mexico to China, the Moluccas and Peru, as well as the Venetian print shops and the rival courts of Spain and England.
Such a global scope of Renaissance historiography shows to what extent unexpected discoveries challenged the recovery of models from Classical Antiquity: What was the historical past of peoples, like the Native Americans, of whom Europeans had never heard? In which way should they explain the traces of remote ages ignored by both the Bible and the Greek and Latin authors? How to reconcile a sudden multiplicity of histories with the increasing sense of the unity of the planet? Such questions led to a variety of answers in the writing of world history that still matter today.
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Edited Books by Giuseppe Marcocci
This volume provides the first survey of the unexplored connections between Machiavelli’s work an... more This volume provides the first survey of the unexplored connections between Machiavelli’s work and the Islamic world, running from the Arabic roots of The Prince to its first translations into Ottoman Turkish and Arabic. It investigates comparative descriptions of non-European peoples, Renaissance representations of Muḥammad and the Ottoman military discipline, a Jesuit treatise in Persian for a Mughal emperor, peculiar readers from Brazil to India, and the parallel lives of Machiavelli and the bureaucrat Celālzāde Muṣṭafá. Ten distinguished scholars analyse the backgrounds, circulation and reception of Machiavelli’s writings, focusing on many aspects of the mutual exchange of political theories and grammars between East and West. A significant contribution to attempts by current scholarship to challenge any rigid separation within Eurasia, this volume restores a sense of the global spreading of books, ideas and men in the past.
1 Introduction: Re-Orienting Machiavelli
Lucio Biasiori and Giuseppe Marcocci
Part One – From Readings to Readers
2 Islamic Roots of Machiavelli’s Thought? The Prince and the Kitāb sirr al-asrār from Baghdad to Florence and Back
Lucio Biasiori
3 Turkophilia and Religion: Machiavelli, Giovio and the Sixteenth-Century Debate about War
Vincenzo Lavenia
4 Machiavelli and the Antiquarians
Carlo Ginzburg
Part Two – Religion and Empires
5 Roman Prophet or Muslim Caesar: Muḥammad the Lawgiver before and after Machiavelli
Pier Mattia Tommasino
6 Mediterranean Exemplars: Jesuit Political Lessons for a Mughal Emperor
Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam
7 Machiavelli and the Islamic Empire: Tropical Readers from Brazil to India (Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries)
Giuseppe Marcocci
Part Three – Beyond Orientalism
8 A Tale of Two Chancellors: Machiavelli, Celālzāde Muṣṭafā, and Connected Political Cultures in the Cinquecento/the Hijri Tenth Century
Kaya Şahin
9 Machiavelli Enters the Sublime Porte: The Introduction of The Prince to the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman World
Nergiz Yılmaz Aydoğdu
10 Translating Machiavelli in Egypt: The Prince and the Shaping of a New Political Vocabulary in the Nineteenth-Century Arab Mediterranean
Elisabetta Benigni
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Viella (Rome), 2015
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Brill (Leiden; Boston), 2015
'Space and Conversion in Global Perspective' examines experiences of conversion as they intersect... more 'Space and Conversion in Global Perspective' examines experiences of conversion as they intersect with physical location, mobility, and interiority. The volume’s innovative approach is global and encompasses multiple religious traditions. Conversion emerges as a powerful force in early modern globalization.
In thirteen essays, the book ranges from the urban settings of Granada and Cuzco to mission stations in Latin America and South India; from villages in Ottoman Palestine and Middle-Volga Russia to Italian hospitals and city squares; and from Atlantic slave ships to the inner life of a Muslim turned Jesuit. Drawing on extensive archival and iconographic materials, this collection invites scholars to rethink conversion in light of the spatial turn.
Contributors are: Paolo Aranha, Emanuele Colombo, Irene Fosi, Mercedes García-Arenal, Agnieszka Jagodzińska, Aliocha Maldavsky, Giuseppe Marcocci, Susana Bastos Mateus, Adriano Prosperi, Gabriela Ramos, Rocco Sacconaghi, Felicita Tramontana, Guillermo Wilde, and Oxana Zemtsova.
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Società e Storia 138: 729-822, 2012
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Edizioni della Normale (Pisa), 2011
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Articles by Giuseppe Marcocci
Journal of Baroque Studies, 2017
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In the past two decades, empires have increasingly attracted the attention of historians of the e... more In the past two decades, empires have increasingly attracted the attention of historians of the early modern period to the detriment of the traditional focus on states as the default political unit of analysis. The emergence of global history is not alien to this turn. This article maintains that our understanding of configurations of the early modern political map would only benefit from detaching the history of the state from its European trajectory and focusing on the multiple connections between states and empires across the world. Not only did both states and empires share the problem of having too much to rule, but their differences were not always so clear to the historical actors. Therefore, looking at their interactions at a local level might be a promising line to follow in future research.
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The coexistence of a process of hierarchy and discrimination among human groups alongside dynamic... more The coexistence of a process of hierarchy and discrimination among human groups alongside dynamics of cultural and social hybridization in the Portuguese world in the early modern age has led to an intense historiographical debate. This article aims to contribute to extending our perspectives, focusing on the circulation of two global categories of classification: negro (Black) and gentio (Heathen) between the mid-fifteenth and late-sixteenth century. In particular, it explores the intersections between the perception of skin color and the reworking of theological concepts in a biologizing direction, which ran parallel to the development of an anti-Jewish theory based on blood purity. The line of enquiry leads from the coasts of West Africa, where it immediately meets the problem of slavery, to Brazil, via South Asia. The intense cross fertilization of the categories of negro and gentio in the Portuguese world provides us with an alternative geography and institutional process of racialization to that of the Spanish Empire.
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Historical Reflections /Reflexions Historiques 41, 2: 37-52, 2015
In 1578, a same-sex community that gathered in a church, performing marriages between men, was di... more In 1578, a same-sex community that gathered in a church, performing marriages between men, was discovered in Rome. Documentary evidence now verifies this story, reported by many sources, including a passage of Michel de Montaigne's 'Travel Journal', but which was for a long time denied by scholars. While briefly reconstructing this affair, this article explores the complex emotional regime surrounding the episode. In particular, it argues that those who participated in the ceremonies did so not only as an expression of affection for their partners, but also in an attempt to legitimize their relationship in a rite that imitated the Counter-Reformation sacrament of marriage. This approach challenges the predominant historiography on the birth of homosexuality and helps us to better understand the sentiments of those who were part of a same-sex community in Renaissance Rome.
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Storica 60: 7-50, 2014
Over the past two decades social sciences have experienced a global turn which also has affected ... more Over the past two decades social sciences have experienced a global turn which also has affected both the conventional chronologies and geographies of historical research. This article focuses on the Italian Peninsula in a period that can be termed early global age, roughly from 1300 to 1700, when connection and communication among the different parts of the world significantly increased.
The aim is to challenge the dominant narrative of Italy as a region whose history has been defined by its main dynamics within the Peninsula and its relationship with Europe and the Mediterranean. On the contrary, this article provides bold evidence, from overseas projections of Italian powers (before and after the formation of the Iberian empires) to intellectual reactions, from wide-ranging circulation of people and objects to global lives of individuals, that show to what extent a global reconfiguration of Italian history raises new questions and can open a promising field of research.
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Journal of Early Modern History 18: 473-494, 2014
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Books by Giuseppe Marcocci
Such a global scope of Renaissance historiography shows to what extent unexpected discoveries challenged the recovery of models from Classical Antiquity: What was the historical past of peoples, like the Native Americans, of whom Europeans had never heard? In which way should they explain the traces of remote ages ignored by both the Bible and the Greek and Latin authors? How to reconcile a sudden multiplicity of histories with the increasing sense of the unity of the planet? Such questions led to a variety of answers in the writing of world history that still matter today.
Edited Books by Giuseppe Marcocci
1 Introduction: Re-Orienting Machiavelli
Lucio Biasiori and Giuseppe Marcocci
Part One – From Readings to Readers
2 Islamic Roots of Machiavelli’s Thought? The Prince and the Kitāb sirr al-asrār from Baghdad to Florence and Back
Lucio Biasiori
3 Turkophilia and Religion: Machiavelli, Giovio and the Sixteenth-Century Debate about War
Vincenzo Lavenia
4 Machiavelli and the Antiquarians
Carlo Ginzburg
Part Two – Religion and Empires
5 Roman Prophet or Muslim Caesar: Muḥammad the Lawgiver before and after Machiavelli
Pier Mattia Tommasino
6 Mediterranean Exemplars: Jesuit Political Lessons for a Mughal Emperor
Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam
7 Machiavelli and the Islamic Empire: Tropical Readers from Brazil to India (Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries)
Giuseppe Marcocci
Part Three – Beyond Orientalism
8 A Tale of Two Chancellors: Machiavelli, Celālzāde Muṣṭafā, and Connected Political Cultures in the Cinquecento/the Hijri Tenth Century
Kaya Şahin
9 Machiavelli Enters the Sublime Porte: The Introduction of The Prince to the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman World
Nergiz Yılmaz Aydoğdu
10 Translating Machiavelli in Egypt: The Prince and the Shaping of a New Political Vocabulary in the Nineteenth-Century Arab Mediterranean
Elisabetta Benigni
In thirteen essays, the book ranges from the urban settings of Granada and Cuzco to mission stations in Latin America and South India; from villages in Ottoman Palestine and Middle-Volga Russia to Italian hospitals and city squares; and from Atlantic slave ships to the inner life of a Muslim turned Jesuit. Drawing on extensive archival and iconographic materials, this collection invites scholars to rethink conversion in light of the spatial turn.
Contributors are: Paolo Aranha, Emanuele Colombo, Irene Fosi, Mercedes García-Arenal, Agnieszka Jagodzińska, Aliocha Maldavsky, Giuseppe Marcocci, Susana Bastos Mateus, Adriano Prosperi, Gabriela Ramos, Rocco Sacconaghi, Felicita Tramontana, Guillermo Wilde, and Oxana Zemtsova.
Articles by Giuseppe Marcocci
The aim is to challenge the dominant narrative of Italy as a region whose history has been defined by its main dynamics within the Peninsula and its relationship with Europe and the Mediterranean. On the contrary, this article provides bold evidence, from overseas projections of Italian powers (before and after the formation of the Iberian empires) to intellectual reactions, from wide-ranging circulation of people and objects to global lives of individuals, that show to what extent a global reconfiguration of Italian history raises new questions and can open a promising field of research.
Such a global scope of Renaissance historiography shows to what extent unexpected discoveries challenged the recovery of models from Classical Antiquity: What was the historical past of peoples, like the Native Americans, of whom Europeans had never heard? In which way should they explain the traces of remote ages ignored by both the Bible and the Greek and Latin authors? How to reconcile a sudden multiplicity of histories with the increasing sense of the unity of the planet? Such questions led to a variety of answers in the writing of world history that still matter today.
1 Introduction: Re-Orienting Machiavelli
Lucio Biasiori and Giuseppe Marcocci
Part One – From Readings to Readers
2 Islamic Roots of Machiavelli’s Thought? The Prince and the Kitāb sirr al-asrār from Baghdad to Florence and Back
Lucio Biasiori
3 Turkophilia and Religion: Machiavelli, Giovio and the Sixteenth-Century Debate about War
Vincenzo Lavenia
4 Machiavelli and the Antiquarians
Carlo Ginzburg
Part Two – Religion and Empires
5 Roman Prophet or Muslim Caesar: Muḥammad the Lawgiver before and after Machiavelli
Pier Mattia Tommasino
6 Mediterranean Exemplars: Jesuit Political Lessons for a Mughal Emperor
Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam
7 Machiavelli and the Islamic Empire: Tropical Readers from Brazil to India (Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries)
Giuseppe Marcocci
Part Three – Beyond Orientalism
8 A Tale of Two Chancellors: Machiavelli, Celālzāde Muṣṭafā, and Connected Political Cultures in the Cinquecento/the Hijri Tenth Century
Kaya Şahin
9 Machiavelli Enters the Sublime Porte: The Introduction of The Prince to the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman World
Nergiz Yılmaz Aydoğdu
10 Translating Machiavelli in Egypt: The Prince and the Shaping of a New Political Vocabulary in the Nineteenth-Century Arab Mediterranean
Elisabetta Benigni
In thirteen essays, the book ranges from the urban settings of Granada and Cuzco to mission stations in Latin America and South India; from villages in Ottoman Palestine and Middle-Volga Russia to Italian hospitals and city squares; and from Atlantic slave ships to the inner life of a Muslim turned Jesuit. Drawing on extensive archival and iconographic materials, this collection invites scholars to rethink conversion in light of the spatial turn.
Contributors are: Paolo Aranha, Emanuele Colombo, Irene Fosi, Mercedes García-Arenal, Agnieszka Jagodzińska, Aliocha Maldavsky, Giuseppe Marcocci, Susana Bastos Mateus, Adriano Prosperi, Gabriela Ramos, Rocco Sacconaghi, Felicita Tramontana, Guillermo Wilde, and Oxana Zemtsova.
The aim is to challenge the dominant narrative of Italy as a region whose history has been defined by its main dynamics within the Peninsula and its relationship with Europe and the Mediterranean. On the contrary, this article provides bold evidence, from overseas projections of Italian powers (before and after the formation of the Iberian empires) to intellectual reactions, from wide-ranging circulation of people and objects to global lives of individuals, that show to what extent a global reconfiguration of Italian history raises new questions and can open a promising field of research.
Giuseppe Marcocci, Università della Tuscia, Viterbo
Discussant: Nicholas Mithen
The early global period (1400-1700) witnessed an explosion of information about new people and lands all around the world. Scholars have variously labelled this complex and multi-directional process, often resorting to the notion of ‘discovery’. A number of books and treatises of ethnography and geography, maps and collections shows the attempts to convert this confused information into knowledge.
Much less attention has been paid to the parallel emergence of a rupture in the historical understanding, shared by a variety of written cultures from Asia to Europe and the Americas: the interaction among peoples of the world having always ignored each other, was soon associated with the discovery of the multiplicity of the past.
In Europe and its overseas empires, curiosity for the past played a special role in making the invention of a new historiography possible. While endorsing current models, this historiography reshaped them in a global perspective. In so doing, it became alternative to canonical histories of cities, kingdoms and republics, that have been usually identified with the Renaissance historiography. In fact, this intellectual reaction produced a set of works that can be considered world histories.
This paper explores the relationship between curiosity and historiography in the slow and challenging development of new patterns in order to investigate and connect to each other a number of disordered materials about the past of the world. To what extent was it possible to grasp the history of countries and populations unknown until recent times? When and how did historians shift from curiosity for the fragments of an exotic past to their inclusion in a more or less coherent historical narrative? And in which way had they to organize their information, being it authentic or forged, so that readers could understand it?
Many answers were given to these questions. However, all these answers as a whole show that the main point was not much the quantity of information one could possess and accumulate, but the morphology of the historical discourse. Cultural background and personal experience had a decisive influence on the innovative solutions that different authors found. Before official versions gratifying political and religious powers prevailed in the late sixteenth century, the world historians that will be considered in this paper, dealt creatively with a composite body of unknown languages, non-alphabetic scripts and archaeological finds, revealing a peculiar common ground between antiquarianism and historiography.
Readings:
Peter Burke, “America and the Rewriting of World History,” in Karen O. Kupperman (ed.), America in European Consciousness, 1493-1750 (Chapel Hill & London: University Press of North Carolina, 1995) 33-51;
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “On World Historians in the Sixteenth Century,” Representation 91, 1 (2005): 26-57.
American Fruit and European Knowledge in the West Indies, 16th-17th centuries.
Gregorio Saldarriaga, Villa I Tatti. The Harvard University
Discussant: Charlotte Bellamy
During the discovery and settlement of America, in the European imagination, fruit had an ambiguous character: at the same time was a symbol of status, a sensual pleasure and a dangerous food. Faced with the novelty and abundance found in the New World, Europeans had to pay special attention, because the vegetal threat became increasingly latent. There were three risks: the real one—there is toxic fruit in America—; the cultural/medical one—it was necessary to identify their humoral features in order to know how to eat them—; and, finally, the one regarding status—it was necessary to reestablish the principles of social and ethnic stratification with the new products and the new subaltern groups—. For the purposes of this presentation I will only consider the last two, because it will allow us to understand how, since the end of the 15th Century until the beginning of the 17th Century, European ideas and knowledge were tested in America, when faced with the unknown, in an interaction where medicine, diet, natural history (taxonomy) and cooking melted.
Reading:
Allen J. Grieco, The Social Politics of Pre-Linnaean Botanical Classification, in I Tatti Studies: Essays in the Renaissance, Vol. 4 (1991), pp. 131-149
Not Crazy About Monsters. Where the Curiosity of the Academy of the Curious Ended
Fabian Krämer (LMU-Munich)
Discussant: José Juan Bentran Coello
Founded in 1652, the programme of the Academia Naturae Curiosorum (today the German National Academy of the Sciences Leopoldina) was considerably revised less than twenty years later. At the heart of this reform lay the Miscellanea curiosa, the journal that »the Curious« established in 1670. The »epistemic genre« (Gianna Pomata) they chose for the articles in the Miscellanea curiosa was the observatio. Writing an observatio implied singling out a nugget of experience and documenting it in writing.
In the first half-century of its existence, rare things of nature figured prominently in the Miscellanea curiosa. Physicians from all over Europe sent in a seemingly endless stream of reports on monsters. This was increasingly considered as problematic by leading members and functionaries of the academy. Their reluctance to accept ever more observationes on monsters for publication in the Miscellanea curiosa cannot be fully accounted for by reference to the fact that preternatural phenomena seemed to be almost ubiquitous in the learned discourse of the period. The Curiosi could not but note that monsters were still often interpreted as prodigies bearing divine messages. As such they had the potential to cause unrest and disorder among the populace.
Reading:
Neil Kenny, The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, esp. 3.4.1 (Academies and learned societies).
Such a global scope of Renaissance historiography shows to what extent unexpected discoveries challenged the recovery of models from Classical Antiquity: What was the historical past of peoples, like the Native Americans, of whom Europeans had never heard? In which way should they explain the traces of remote ages ignored by both the Bible and the Greek and Latin authors? How to reconcile a sudden multiplicity of histories with the increasing sense of the unity of the planet? Such questions led to a variety of answers in the writing of world history that still matter today.

We invite ground-breaking research articles that either critically address the history of relational approaches to historical and cultural studies, or apply a possible variant of such perspectives (comparative, connected, global history, etc.) to a research theme (political, intellectual, social, cultural, religious, and so on), combined with a reflection on its theoretical implications. Any geographic area may be considered, while the time span covered by the issue will be from 1400 to 1900. The opening historiographical essay will be by Prof. Dr. Margrit Pernau, Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (Center for the History of Emotions), Berlin.
Submissions must be sent no later than January 14, 2017 to: giovanni.tarantino@uwa.edu.au and/or g.marcocci@unitus.it.
Articles should be no more than 7,000 words in length, notes included. Proposals should include a c.500 word abstract and a short biography of the author. Please prepare your essays using the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition (www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/), using footnotes rather than endnotes. Authors will be informed as to whether or not their articles have been accepted for publication within two months, following evaluation by two internationally renowned referees. The issue will be published online by April 2017.
The thematic section of the next issue of CROMOHS will be devoted to the intersection between beliefs and emotions in the context of cross-cultural imperial encounters and interactions. The geographical scope is global and the possible chronology ranges from 1400 to 1900. The opening historiographic piece will be offered by Merry Wiesner-Hanks, Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Given that emotions are determined by context, we might ask to what extent the reconstruction of the language of affect allows us to move beyond the idea of incommensurability among different cultures in a colonial context as well as beyond the limits of Eurocentric approaches. We invite groundbreaking research articles on affective reactions to cultural transformation, to violence and interference in the daily life of native societies, to mission and conversion, to religious confrontation and disputation, as well as on written or iconographic representations of the beliefs and emotions involved in imperial and cross-cultural histories. Articles should be no more than 7,000 words in length, notes included. Submissions must be sent no later than March 30, 2016 to: g_tarantino@hotmail.com and g.marcocci@unitus.it.