In The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe, Ayesha Ramachandran argues that “[i]t would be no exaggeration to identify the central intellectual task of the late Renaissance … as the problem of ‘the world’ itself.” Once secure in its seat at the center of the cosmic hierarchy, the world, by the mid-seventeenth century, had been dislodged and hurled into orbit, its surface reconfigured through colonial encounters and its singularity challenged by a resurgent epicureanism that posited an infinite plurality of worlds. As recent scholarship emphasizes, the upheaval wrought by these developments sparked a spate of world-making activity among early modern Europeans, who embraced a newfound faith in poiesis, or human making, as a means of reconceiving the world and humanity’s place within it.