Saperi viventi : libri, relazioni e natura nel primo orientalismo cattolico

Abstract

This book traces how Catholic Europe in the early modern period learned another way of thinking through its encounters — often unequal and sometimes violent — with the cultures it called “Oriental.” Through a series of case studies, Living Knowledges reconstructs the fragile and material processes by which knowledge was produced across frontiers of faith, empire, and language. From the libraries of Venice to the animal hospitals of India, from the hermitages of Mount Lebanon to the prisons of Malta, the book follows the traces of these cross-cultural apprenticeships: looted books, lessons given by enslaved men, shared herbals, experiments in translation between different religious worlds. What emerges is an early modern Orientalism that was not yet a unified discipline but a constellation of unstable forms of knowledge, born within political and theological crisis. Encounters with other ways of inhabiting the natural world became spaces of domination and wonder, where iconoclasms of the living could destroy and desecrate, yet also inspire new images of curiosity and gentleness. Across its four intertwined chapters — on books, animals, plants, and masters — the book shows how knowledge about the “Orient” was not only a matter of representation but also a product of collaboration, dependence, and exchange. Living Knowledges invites us to read the history of Orientalism as the history of a knowledge that, rather than conquering what it touched, was itself transformed by the encounter.