Paula Findlen
Global Knowledge ca. 1600: The View from Florence and Milan

Between 1585 and 1603, the Milanese patrician Urbano Monte made and remade a world map without ever leaving his native Lombardy. During these same decades, the Florentine merchant Francesco Carletti embarked on a voyage that began from Seville in 1594 and ended with his return to Florence in 1606, having unexpectedly circumnavigated the globe.  Monte’s map and Carletti’s account of his voyage are two distinctly different products of the desire for global knowledge around 1600.  Neither of them came from the center of a long-distance empire but both were distinctive products of the culture, information, artifacts, people, and ambitions in Milan and Florence.

This talk explores the relationship between place and knowledge in the making of the early modern world as well as the circumstances that inspired the making of global knowledge between the 1580s and early 1600s.  It also provides broader context for the collaborative work of a group of colleagues and students from the EUI, Stanford, Syracuse, and University of Warwick, in particular, with the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana on the current exhibition, Global Florence: The World of Francesco Carletti, ca. 1573-1636.

Paula Findlen is Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History and Director of the Program in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at Stanford University. She is the author of Possessing Nature: Collecting and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (1994).  Her recent publications include A World in the Making: Urbano Monte's Global Map ca. 1587 (2025) and a coedited volume with Brian Brege, Luca Molà, and Giorgio Riello, Trading at the Edge of Empires: Francesco's Carletti's World c. 1600 (2026).  A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she was awarded the 2016 Premio Galileo Galilei. 

This lecture is part of this year's Summer School “Welcome to Florence”. Workers, Foreigners, and Other Communities in the Renaissance and in the Present (October 5-10 2026).