When I first saw the title and cover of this book, my imagination immediately presented its context in the form of world atlases with annotated maps and rich comments by Renaissance authors. Now I know that imagination may not be the best guide, as the book was quite distant from what I imagined. The author does not address the subject of the impression of the various world continents on maps and how they change in the Renaissance, as I imagined the “Globe” would be presented. I expected that the author would compare the various stages of the growth of European knowledge of seas, shorelines, and the unknown that lay beyond: a topic worth studying on its own, but not the contents of the discussed volume. Yet in no way was I disappointed in reading the work of Giuseppe Marcocci.

This work is about the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century descriptions of the various known and slowly discovered peoples inhabiting the Earth—their histories, ways of living, doing business, and art—namely, their lives. The author opens the story with a 1575 edition of Jerónimo Román's Republicas del mundo, which was intended as a history of human civilization in the Renaissance period. Addressing the awakened interest in who various groups of humans in various locations were, where they came from, and what kind of religions and cultures they represented, Román met the questions of his time. He described many aspects of the life and history of ancient Jews, Christians, and Indigenous peoples of Latin America (Mexico and Peru), as well as inhabitants of Northern Europe, Venice, Genoa, England, Lucca, Switzerland, Ragusa, ancient Rome, Tunis, and Fez (1).

Of course, the order in which these peoples and their histories were presented, as well as the size of each description, its details, and the tone of the narrative, differed greatly. This is exactly what Marcocci turns our attention to. The descriptions provided by Jerónimo Román were the exposition of contemporary knowledge of various peoples and their cultures, but also of the contemporary vision of the significance and importance in human development of those peoples at the time. The 1595 edition experienced some cuts as a result of Inquisition censorship, but eventually a third volume was added to the earlier two, taking the reader on an additional tour of the Ottoman Empire, China, parts of Ethiopia, and Tartary (Central Asia). What Marcocci does in his work is present Renaissance knowledge of the world (which often is mythical, legendary, and not relevant to reality), and show us the mode in which that knowledge was seen, perceived, and presented by contemporary writers and intellectuals. We learn some facts about the early modern world, but much more about the function of early modern writers in contemporary learned circles. “This book,” writes the author, “is a study of the trans-imperial cross-fertilization of historical writing in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries” (5).

Marcocci's work is divided into five chapters, each of which approaches Renaissance descriptions of world history and geography in a different way. They provide examples of varying approaches and narratives, but they do not even try to exhaust the written and existing literature. In the first chapter, the author analyzes a model of genealogical history writing through the work of a Franciscan missionary to Mexico, Toribio de Benavente. The second chapter takes a cognitive approach in its study of Portuguese sailor António Galvão, who presents world history as evolving around the constant movement of peoples and goods. Marcocci devotes his third chapter to the work of a non-European writer, Felipe Guadman Poma de Ayala, who at the turn of the century wrote a history in Spanish in which he merged the story of Andean civilization with Old World history—an interesting and fascinating work that was noticed in contemporary Europe.

The final chapter is probably the least surprising, as it is devoted to histories of the world, or world geographies written by contemporary Europeans, that present contemporary knowledge as it was broadened by the exploration and colonization of various areas of the Americas and Asia by the Dutch, the English, and Jesuit missionaries, among others. Marcocci calls this final stage of Renaissance writing of world history “a more static geopolitical body of knowledge,” exemplified in the works of Botero and Sherley.

Marcocci takes us on a fascinating journey through sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century imagination and suggests a new reading of texts that cannot be interpreted by the letter but must rather be understood in their appropriate contexts and ways of thinking about their authors, compilers, and patrons.