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2 The World beyond Italy: Keeping Up- to- date with Portuguese Overseas Expansion: Tracking and Assimilating the New Global Realities in Fifteenth-and Sixteenth- Century Italy

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Provenance and Possession
This chapter is in the book Provenance and Possession
362The World beyond ItalyKeeping Up-to-date with Portuguese Overseas Expansion: Tr acking and Assimilating the New Global Realities in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth- Century Italyin a mor e concentrated way than in chapters 3–6 that follow, this chapter is methodologically a comment on the vagaries of archival and material survival. In the absence of a self-contained set of records able to act as an anchor, such as a particu lar series of registers or an account journal or a collection of cor-respondence, all of which have internal coherence, the archival and material orphans presented here in chapter 2 are a random miscellany that have sur-vived when many of their siblings, cousins and neighbours did not. Whatever sense can be made of them, this is a study based on ‘what remains’, and the aca-demic exercise is to argue from the remains by assessing patterns and proba-bilities. Although survival is always an issue for archival historians, and ‘what remains’ is always incomplete, in this instance the gap between what there was originally and what there is now can be seen to be pronounced. The under-lying princi ple of this book is to follow the documentation; here, however, it is also to point out the many occasions when documentation known previ-ously to exist is no longer extant, and to attempt to make sense of the traces left behind, despite the glaring presence of absence.Analysing in any systematic fashion the interaction of the Italian Renaissance and the Portuguese voyages around the globe, not often consid-ered except chronologically and on a small scale in connection with each other, is far beyond the scope of the present work. Although fuelled by similar mindsets, and by a similar belief in the power of humans to effect revelatory
© 2024 Princeton University Press, Princeton

362The World beyond ItalyKeeping Up-to-date with Portuguese Overseas Expansion: Tr acking and Assimilating the New Global Realities in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth- Century Italyin a mor e concentrated way than in chapters 3–6 that follow, this chapter is methodologically a comment on the vagaries of archival and material survival. In the absence of a self-contained set of records able to act as an anchor, such as a particu lar series of registers or an account journal or a collection of cor-respondence, all of which have internal coherence, the archival and material orphans presented here in chapter 2 are a random miscellany that have sur-vived when many of their siblings, cousins and neighbours did not. Whatever sense can be made of them, this is a study based on ‘what remains’, and the aca-demic exercise is to argue from the remains by assessing patterns and proba-bilities. Although survival is always an issue for archival historians, and ‘what remains’ is always incomplete, in this instance the gap between what there was originally and what there is now can be seen to be pronounced. The under-lying princi ple of this book is to follow the documentation; here, however, it is also to point out the many occasions when documentation known previ-ously to exist is no longer extant, and to attempt to make sense of the traces left behind, despite the glaring presence of absence.Analysing in any systematic fashion the interaction of the Italian Renaissance and the Portuguese voyages around the globe, not often consid-ered except chronologically and on a small scale in connection with each other, is far beyond the scope of the present work. Although fuelled by similar mindsets, and by a similar belief in the power of humans to effect revelatory
© 2024 Princeton University Press, Princeton

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. Contents v
  3. Illustrations vii
  4. Preface xi
  5. Acknowledgements xvii
  6. Abbreviations xxi
  7. 1 Provenance and Its Discontents: Evidence, Relevance, Language, Knowledge 1
  8. 2 The World beyond Italy: Keeping Up- to- date with Portuguese Overseas Expansion: Tracking and Assimilating the New Global Realities in Fifteenth-and Sixteenth- Century Italy 36
  9. 3 Florence’s ‘Black’ Babies: Renaissance Florence Meets Sub- Saharan Africa: Mixed-Ancestry Children at the Ospedale degli Innocenti 82
  10. 4 Inanimate Global Goods: Buying for the Medici Collection on the Iberian Peninsula in the 1540s 123
  11. 5 Living Global Goods: The Acquisition of Living Goods for the Medici from the Portuguese Trading Empire: Provenance and Possession of Flesh and Blood 172
  12. 6 Global Sensibilities: Possessing Consciousness of the Global World in Renaissance Italy: A Papal Official’s Experience in 1590s Lisbon 229
  13. Parting Thoughts: Knowledge, Ignorance and Non-knowledge 290
  14. Bibliography 293
  15. Name Index 333
  16. Subject Index 341
  17. A NOTE ON THE TYPE 347
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https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691246895-006

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. Contents v
  3. Illustrations vii
  4. Preface xi
  5. Acknowledgements xvii
  6. Abbreviations xxi
  7. 1 Provenance and Its Discontents: Evidence, Relevance, Language, Knowledge 1
  8. 2 The World beyond Italy: Keeping Up- to- date with Portuguese Overseas Expansion: Tracking and Assimilating the New Global Realities in Fifteenth-and Sixteenth- Century Italy 36
  9. 3 Florence’s ‘Black’ Babies: Renaissance Florence Meets Sub- Saharan Africa: Mixed-Ancestry Children at the Ospedale degli Innocenti 82
  10. 4 Inanimate Global Goods: Buying for the Medici Collection on the Iberian Peninsula in the 1540s 123
  11. 5 Living Global Goods: The Acquisition of Living Goods for the Medici from the Portuguese Trading Empire: Provenance and Possession of Flesh and Blood 172
  12. 6 Global Sensibilities: Possessing Consciousness of the Global World in Renaissance Italy: A Papal Official’s Experience in 1590s Lisbon 229
  13. Parting Thoughts: Knowledge, Ignorance and Non-knowledge 290
  14. Bibliography 293
  15. Name Index 333
  16. Subject Index 341
  17. A NOTE ON THE TYPE 347
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