La Sfera / The Globe

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.