La Sfera / The Globe: Cosmology, Science, and Geography in the Fifteenth-Century Mediterranean (Italica Press Historical Travel)

OF ALL THE MISCONCEPTIONS about the Middle Ages, one of the most persistent and erroneous is the claim that people before Christopher Columbus thought the world was flat - a myth popularized in the 1820s by the American novelist Washington Irving. In fact, Europeans had known the world was round since the days of the ancient Greeks, and famous fifteenth-century explorers like Columbus and Prince Henry the Navigator were building on a centuries-long tradition of intercontinental travel and cultural exchange. The study of cosmology and natural philosophy in the Middle Ages always assumed that the Earth was round, as we see in La Sfera ("The Globe") by Gregorio (Goro) Dati (1362-1436). This early-fifteenth-century treatise in poetic form introduced readers to the cosmos, the natural world, and the geography of the Mediterranean. La Sfera summarized Europeans' sense of the world and its geography in the period before Columbus, particularly in those last few decades when middle-class Italians like Dati dominated the global economy.

SEVEN AUTHORS examine the multiple intellectual and literary genres that influenced Dati's La Sfera, including the mapping traditions on which Dati drew for his itinerary and illustrations, the medieval science behind its cosmology, geography, and explanations of the natural world, and the traditions of composition in the Italian vernacular that were especially popular in fifteenth-century Florence. To understand how La Sfera was received by Dati's contemporaries, they also review the many surviving manuscripts of the text - each one handwritten and unique in its witness to Dati's work - and the patterns that emerge among them. The authors explain the editorial choices that produced this edition and translation, based on the linguistic particularities of Dati's Italian and their own policies of editorial practice and translation.

THIS EDITION of Dati's La Sfera was undertaken by a team of scholars who collaborated over several years to establish a base text of the poem in Italian and render it into English. In this volume they combine their academic disciplines and specialties, among them history, the history of science, literary history, textual criticism, and paleography.

THIS VOLUME presents the text of Dati's La Sfera, a parallel English translation, and an array of images from the manuscript tradition to demonstrate how its diagrams and maps enhance the reader's understanding of the text. Each image appears alongside the text that it would normally accompany in the manuscripts. This illustrated edition is therefore the opposite of a facsimile. It offers readers a sense of the diversity of the corpus by reproducing images from different codices. By using this method, the authors hope to give readers a clear understanding of Dati's holistic approach to fifteenth-century poetry, science, art, commerce, and cartography.

190 pages. Preface, Introduction, complete Italian text of La Sfera with parallel English translation, Notes to the Text and to the Figures, Bibliography, Index.

55 color manuscript images, 1 greyscale image, 1 table, 2 new maps.

History, history of science & literature, cartography, manuscript studies.

Gregorio Dati (1362-1435) was the son of the Florentine silk merchant Anastagio Dati and became a silk merchant himself. By 1384, he was conducting business in Valencia, Barcelona, and the Balearic Islands. Despite business failures, capture by pirates, and unscrupulous partners, he kept his business afloat. His four marriages bore Dati twenty-six legitimate children and an illegitimate son by an enslaved Tatar woman, Margherita. Dati was elected eleven times as consul of the Florentine silk guild, served on the Florentine trade board, and was twice Gonfaloniere di compagnia. In 1425, he was prior on the city's highest council, and in 1429 as Gonfaloniere di giustizia, its highest office. Between 1430 and 1433 he continued to advise in the city's deliberations.

CARRIE BENES is a cultural historian with extensive experience in spatial history whose research focuses on landscape and urban identity in late medieval Italy. Her publications include She is Professor of Medieval & Renaissance History at New College of Florida and Co-Director for Spatial Analysis for the Sfera Project.

LAURA INGALLINELLA is a literary historian specializing on the conceptualization of gender, race, and cross-regional exchange in premodern Italy. Her work has been published in I Tatti Studies in the Renaissance, Forum Italicum, Bibliotheca Dantesca, Medioevo Romanzo, and Revue Mabillon. She is completing her first monograph, The Fraudulent Muse: Gender and Literary Forgery in Early Modern Italy, and co-editing Crossroads of Difference: Race and the Making of Premodern Italy with Robert J. Clines. She is Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of Toronto and Co-Director for Editorial Practice for the Sfera Project.