The impact of the European discovery and rapid colonization of the New World in the early modern period is a classic subject with a rich historiography. Despite the ecological, economic, social, and political dimensions of this impact, the debate has tended to focus on the intellectual and cultural aspects, what Rosario Romeo in his excellent Le scoperte americane nella coscienza italiana del Cinquecento of 1954 termed “consciousness.” The quincentenary of 1992 fueled renewed interest in a topic that has always been highly relevant for the construction of modern identities on both sides of the Atlantic.
This recent flourishing has been accompanied by a strong corrective, with many historians insisting that the great geographic discoveries and colonial ventures that came to define the early modern centuries as an age of unprecedented global encounters were also African and Asian; hence, quite often it is more appropriate to talk about Europe's New Worlds than about the New World. When, in the mid-1490s, the Milanese humanist at the Spanish court, Peter Martyr of Anghiera, began writing the Orbe Novo, in what amounts to the first informed history of the discovery and colonization of the Western Indies, he meant to emphasize that the world revealed by his friend Columbus was unknown to the ancients, not to predefine an American exceptionalism. Initially, it was far from clear whether the islands and continent found in the western ocean were the eastern extremes of Asia, as Columbus always insisted, or, as his critics asserted, an entirely new land.
The handsome volume edited by Elizabeth Horodowich and Lia Markey reassesses the cultural impact of discovery by examining the specific role of the Italian peninsula—at the heart of the European Renaissance but only indirectly involved in the process of colonization. Being under the political dominion of the Spanish monarchy, or often engaged in trying to resist it, was no obstacle to widespread curiosity for the Americas. It also gave many individual Italians opportunities to exchange goods and information and even directly collaborate in the colonial enterprise (for example with the Catholic missions), as well as a close experience of the Spanish imperial ethos.
The volume's central point, that Italian engagement with the New World and its historical, artistic, and literary interpretation was in fact intense, as opposed to blunted or marginal, is far from novel. Where the collection breaks some new ground is in the range of sources it considers, integrating the study of material culture with the more traditional analysis of texts and images. In this manner, it exemplifies the broadening of subjects and interdisciplinary nature of the new cultural history that has flourished over the last few decades. Generalizations about Italian, let alone European, consciousness, no longer capture what historians are looking for as they consider images, objects, and texts from a myriad of perspectives, making it difficult to disentangle subjectivity from diverse cultural practices that only make sense when carefully contextualized.
There is a great deal to commend about many individual essays. In what amounts to a general survey of the subject, Horodowich emphasizes the extent to which the Italian states both influenced the age of encounters and were shaped by it. At the heart of this chapter is the problem of how to construct the problem of Italy and the New World without thinking in terms of an Italian nation-state in the early modern centuries. Was there one distinctive Italian response underlying the diverse interests in Naples, Rome, Tuscany, Milan, Genoa, and Venice? The answer seems to lie in a deeper analysis of the extent to which many Italian responses were closely intertwined with, as well as constrained by, the Spanish imperial system. Federica Ambrosini, for example, reviews the Venetian assessment of the Spanish colonial system through diplomatic reports, the famous relazioni. Ambrosini argues for a more skeptical reading of these familiar sources: far from offering an objective analysis, they betray biases reflecting the considerable political distance between Venice and the Spanish monarchy.
From the opposite perspective of Naples, a kingdom entirely within the Spanish sphere of influence, Mackenzie Cooley emphasizes the many connections allowing Southern Italians to participate in Spain's American experience. She is less convincing when equating the Spanish subjugation of Naples to the cruelties suffered by Mexico's Indians—the parallel was a rhetorical commonplace in the period, but the degree of cultural and physical violence involved bears little comparison. This chapter, like others in the volume, suffers from the potential confusion derived from the current thesis of a “polycentric monarchy” that treats all the territories of the Spanish Empire as somewhat equal, dissolving the fundamental distinction between the dynastic incorporation of European territories like Portugal, Naples, or the Crown of Aragon into a composite monarchy relying on elite consent, and the aggressive settler colonialism, racial discrimination, and brutal labor exploitation that characterized the Spanish Indies.
It is not possible here to do justice to all the valuable chapters in the collection, including echoes of Dante's poems on Ulysses's daring but ill-fated oceanic navigation in the Italian retrospective interpretation of Columbus's discovery (Mary Watt); the even more far-fetched transformation of Columbus as the hero of the conquest of Muslim Granada in a 1650 epic poem by Girolamo Graziani (Nathalie Hester); what al vivo really meant in the remarkable ethnographic images collected and copied by the Bolognese naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi in the late sixteenth century (Lia Markey); and even a rearguard vindication of the increasingly questioned blunted-impact paradigm by charting the very slow and often wrongheaded adoption of New World plants like maize, potatoes, and tomatoes in Europe (David Gentilcore). The overall impression is that, without the opportunity to compete directly for territorial control in the New World, Italians could treat the Americas as a space for the patriotic imagination while, at the same time, engaging discreetly in all kinds of pragmatic interactions, either with imperial Spain or with its enemies.
The volume of essays in Italian and Spanish dedicated to the respected Italian scholar Francesca Cantù, Europa e America allo specchio, has a very wide focus, as is perhaps inevitable in a traditional festschrift. Even more than the volume edited by Horodowich and Markey, the book is best judged by the quality of its individual contributions. Unfortunately some chapters add little to previous scholarship, suggesting the lack of a rigorous selection process. Interesting essays include the three written by the editors. Paolo Broggio offers an account of the fierce dispute between Jesuits and Dominicans to have their higher education institutions in the New World recognized, while seeking to hamper each other in Spain and in Rome. Manfredi Merluzzi reflects on the civilizing mission of the Spanish Empire through the transfer of European (or, more precisely, Castilian) institutions, in this case the 250 settler cities and 3,000 native communities that made up the Indias Occidentales at the turn of the seventeenth century. Interestingly, Merluzzi observes the same classically inspired model of geometrical urban planning around a central square, with a parallel emphasis on the symbolic centrality of the church, were used for Spanish settlers and native reducciones, even as the two kinds of settlements were kept apart.
Luigi Guarnieri Calò Carducci, in turn, focuses on interesting expressions of a gradually emerging criollo identity in seventeenth-century Peru, and reveals how those local intellectuals seeking to buttress the aspirations of American-born Spaniards sought to vindicate the New World climate as a positive natural influence against the often negative racial stereotypes that could be found in Spain. The interesting challenge was how to make the colonial racial hierarchies, which the criollo elites were the first to exploit, compatible with a defense of an American nature they also shared with the Indians.
