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America - Europe: In the Mirror of Otherness
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Extract
Because it is not pointlessly, but with much cause and reason, that this land is called the New World. And it is the New World, not because it has been recently discovered, but because its peoples and almost everything about it is like the first and golden age.
Vasco de Quiroga
It was precisely when printing became popular in Europe - which, for the first time in history, permitted the conservation and mass diffusion of ancient Greek, Arab, and Latin writings, a fact that signalled the beginning of the Renaissance - that the Letters of Amerigo Vespucci first appeared. These letters, like a revelation, speak of a novus mundus, a new world of unknown flora, fauna, and men, that contradicts the findings of Ptolemy‘s eminent Cosmography (published in 1478, in Rome), Theophrastus's History of Plants (published in 1498, in Venice), and the hallowed treatises of Aristotle, which were then in fashion.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © 1992 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
References
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