Geographical discoveries have always gone hand in hand with the gathering of knowledge, but no one has produced as much knowledge about other cultures as the Europeans have done since 1500. In the late Middle Ages, individual travelers and members of religious orders wrote about encounters in the near and far East. The presence of individuals from different countries was also evident in everyday life, for example through the presence of enslaved people. However, since 1500 – partly due to the so-called “Printing Revolution” partly for the political and economic implications of the expansion– European knowledge about other societies has grown exponentially: with illustrated leaflets, travelogues and world maps gathered in libraries and museums. Europeans got an idea of other cultures in an unequal position of colonizers, missionaries, merchants or diplomats and this has had huge implications for the ways in which these materials have been collected, written, transmitted, archived, catalogued and interpreted throughout the centuries.
Against this background, the traineeship pursues two goals: it conveys an understanding of the importance of knowledge in the process of early globalization through the inspection and cataloguing of two stocks of old books preserved in the Biblioteca del Beato Pellegrino and in the Biblioteca Civica of Padua, second it introduces places and actors in knowledge production, analyzes the processes of "othering" and examines the transformation of knowledge about the world and circulation in different media between the late Middle Ages and the early modern period through a Blended Intensive Programm, namely a program of international studies and traineeship in source reading and discussion with two other groups of students from the Universities of Jena and Vienna. We will virtually meet the two groups first on April 24th, May 15th and June 12th 2023. Then all the three student groups will meet in Padua from June 18th to 25th. The week will be designed with joint work sessions and day trips to Padua, Venice and Bologna organized by our team of trainees. Please, if you are interested apply by February 17th writing a motivation letter to Prof. Paola Molino (paola.molino@unipd.it). Please note that only max 6 students enrolled in the first and second year of the MA Historical Sciences (including Mobility Studies) will be selected.