Transformer and Influencer: Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s Impact on Western European Geography

In the mid sixteenth century, the study of cosmography was in a state of upheaval in Western Europe. The European voyages of exploration had disrupted the old ideas of the limited inhabitability of the world and was demonstrating that the whole globe was knowable. Cosmographical knowledge was in part constructed through theoretical ideas about the shape and structure of the world, in part by empirical knowledge gained through travellers’ reports. Cosmographers and geographers struggled to accommodate the ever-expanding influx of new empirical knowledge into their works. In the 1550s the Venetian, Giovanni Battista Ramusio compiled the Navigazioni e viaggi, initiating a new form of geography which endeavoured to present a whole world cosmography through the eyes of the traveller. It was a form of cosmography ideally suited to transmitting the knowledge gained from an age of exploration. Ramusio himself was a classical scholar and he used both his knowledge of the classics and his humanist editorial skills in framing the work. His tests for inclusion were not noted authority, however, but attested observation. The reports of the Carthaginian Hanno, the merchant Marco Polo and the conquistador Cortes could all find a place in the work. The book comprised over 70 different narratives, originally written in a variety of different languages, but presented in vernacular Italian. The texts were skillfully woven together with intervening Discorsi, written by Ramusio but clearly distinct from the traveller’s texts so that it was always apparent where the eye-witness ended and the commentary began. Ramusio’s forensic editorial skills, mastery in acquiring texts which had hitherto seen little or no printed circulation, diligence in translating, editing and presenting them in an accessible format made his work invaluable. Proposals by leading geographers to republish it in full in French and English never came to fruition, however, as the cost was perceived as outrunning the benefits. Instead, scholars from all over Europe had to turn to the vernacular Italian for the information. This article examines how the Navigazioni e viaggi became a bedrock of European geographical knowledge examining, in particular, its use by the English geographer John Dee and the French Cosmographer royal, André Thevet. Asa source book for geographical information, it was unparalleled at the time, and influenced cosmographers and cartographers all over Western Europe. Although no-one else fully adopted Ramusio’s form of cosmography through travelogue (the closest example being Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, the travellers’ tales, mediated through the hands of a sedentary Venetian, crisscrossed Europe and became fundamental in creating a new geographical understanding dependent on the words of the eyewitness.