In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the linguistic situation in Europe was one of remarkable fluidity. Latin, the great scholarly lingua franca of the medieval period, was beginning to crack as the tectonic plates shifted beneath it, but the vernaculars had not yet crystallized into the national languages that they would later become, and multilingualism was rife. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world, languages were coming into contact with an intensity that they had never had before, influencing each other and throwing up all manner of hybrids and pidgins as peoples tried to communicate using the semiotic resources they had available. Of interest to linguists, literary scholars and historians, amongst others, this interdisciplinary volume explores the linguistic dynamics operating in Europe and beyond in the crucial centuries between 1400 and 1800. Assuming a state of individual, societal and functional multilingualism, when codeswitching was the norm, and languages themselves were fluid, unbounded and porous, it explores the shifting relationships that existed between various tongues in different geographical contexts, as well as some of the myths and theories that arose to make sense of them.

This volume presents comprehensive research on how southern European Catholics and the Japanese confronted each other, interacted and mutually experienced religious otherness in early modern times. In their highly variable and asymmetric relations, during which the political-military elites of Japan at times not only favoured, but also opposed and strictly controlled the European presence, missionaries - particularly the Jesuits - tried to negotiate this power balance with their interlocutors. This collection of essays analyses religious and cultural interactions between the Christian missions and the Buddhist sects through processes of cooperation, acceptance, confrontation and rejection, dialogue and imposition, which led to the creation of new relational spaces and identities.

This volume aims to advance the analysis about Amerigo Vespucci by considering and connecting several fields of study such as literary history, philology, the history of science and cartography, economic history, and the history of ideas. The multifaceted research frames guide the reader through the complex vicissitudes of Amerigo Vespucci's life. The receptions and implications explore the intense cultural and historical dynamics that shaped the decades between the end of the fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth century.

Fra Mauro's mappamundi, drawn around 1450 in the monastery of San Michele on Murano in the lagoon of Venice, is among the most relevant compendia of knowledge of the Earth and the Cosmos of the fifteenth century. By examining literary, visual, textual and archival evidences, some long considered lost, this book places the map within the larger context of Venetian culture in the fifteenth century. It provides a detailed analysis of both its main sources (auctores veteres such as Pliny, Solinus, Ptolemy, and novi, like Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Marco Polo and Niccolo de' Conti) as well as of the composite networks of contemporary knowledge (scholasticism, humanism, monastic culture, as well as more technical skills such as marine cartography and mercantile practices), investigating the way they combine in the epistemological unity of the imago mundi. More a work on intellectual history than cartography, the book constructs a complex set of frameworks within which to situate Fra Mauro's monumental effort. These range from the cultural history of the reception of the world map from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries to the analysis of the material conditions under which map-makers such as Fra Mauro worked; from the history of ideas, especially of natural philosophy to the links between world representations and travel literature. It also addresses the Venetian reception of Ptolemy's Geography, the interactions between Venetian art, theology and cosmography and the complexities of the Venetian vernacular. The books develops a multi-tiered approach, in which different elements of the rich cultural context in which this world map was created, interact with each other, each casting a new light on the encyclopaedic work being analyzed.