Integrative teaching
Lucio Biasiori
Exercises
Examination procedure
Seminars
Prerequisites
Syllabus
The course will address the topic of travels and commercial, cultural and religious exchanges in the early modern age. We will try to understand how people, books, goods and knowledge were travelling, which were the routes, the times and the rules of travels and crossings.
The first part of the course will focus on a historic introduction, examining some of the key historiography books written on those themes as well as new historiographic trends on the topic.
The second part will deal with the geopolitical aspects of the exchanges; special attention will be given to the rise of the big colonial metropolis and to the regulations and operation of the commercial routes along the Atlantic axis and the Carrera de India, the new Pacific routes, from Lima and Callao to Manila and from the Indian ones, from Ormuz to India.
Finally the third part will focus on the encounters and on the intercultural exchanges of travellers, merchants and missionaries and on their accounts.
A big part of the course will be dedicated to reading books and original documents, printed or hand-written, which will encompass travel books and logs, letters from missionaries in Asia and trials to middlemen and merchants.
There will be introductory lessons and in class readings of books and printed or hand-written sources with palaeographic insight on XVIth century writings.
Similarly to the previous years, there will be a detailed syllabus of the course, with the weekly compulsory readings and the ones that are suggested but optional. Pdf documents will be available on didattica.sns.it