Zugl.: Münster (Westfalen), Univ., Diss., 2008

La compilation des Navigationi et viaggi, publiée à Venise en trois volumes entre 1550 et 1559, est le point d'aboutissement d'un travail de collecte et d'édition de textes géographiques effectué par le géographe humaniste Giovanni Battista Ramusio (1485-1557) au cours de la première moitié du XVIe siècle. Le compilateur entend mettre à jour la description du monde tout en proposant un nouveau modèle de constitution du savoir, dont le point de départ est l'expérience de ceux qui ont pris part aux voyages exploratoires passés et en cours. Ramusio, qui fit toute sa carrière comme secrétaire de chancellerie auprès de la République de Venise, prit appui sur un dense réseau de collaborateurs qui lui fournirent témoignages et récits de voyages. Ce travail de recherche offre pour la première fois une analyse conjointe de la figure de Ramusio comme géographe de cabinet et comme secrétaire de chancellerie, tout en inscrivant son activité dans le contexte de la Venise du début de l'âge moderne.La première partie de la thèse propose une reconstitution, fondée sur un travail d'archives, du laboratoire de Ramusio : les institutions de la République de Venise, le milieu savant italien et le monde de l'édition vénitien. Par l'étude de son statut et de sa démarche, l'interrelation entre ses intérêts propres et ses prérogatives professionnelles est mise en évidence. La deuxième partie porte sur la compilation, elle aborde à la fois les modèles suivis, les choix inédits de mise en forme et les processus de sélection des sources. Les intentions et le projet de Ramusio sont étudiés sur la base de ses propres écrits – les discorsi des Navigationi et viaggi – dans la troisième partie, où l'analyse porte sur la compilation comme ouvrage de géographie politique. / The three-volume compilation, Navigationi et viaggi, published in Venice from 1550 to 1559, is the work of the humanist geographer Giovanni Battista Ramusio (1485-1557), who collected and edited geographical texts throughout the first half of the 16th century. The compiler attempted to update the description of the known world by employing new modes of knowledge, primarily based on the experiences of those who had taken part in exploratory travels. Ramusio, who served the Republic of Venice as a secretary at the chancellery, benefited from a broad network of collaborators who provided him with testimonies and travel accounts. My research offers the first joint analysis of Ramusio, the armchair geographer and secretary, within the context of early-modern Venice.Based on archival research, the first part of this work offers a reconstruction of Ramusio’s laboratory as part of the institutions of the Republic of Venice, the scholarly environment of Italy, and the world of Venetian publishing. The interrelation between his own interests and his professional prerogatives is established through a study of his scholarly approach and official role. The second part of this study focuses on the compilation, taking into account Ramusio’s influences, as well as his original choices for the organisation and selection of knowledge and sources. The objectives of this work of political geography are examined in the third part through an analysis of Ramusio’s own writings, the Navigationi et viaggi’s discorsi.

This dissertation investigates how a network of Venetian and Spanish scholars placed ancient texts and new geographic information about the Americas in dialogue to create new histories of the modern world, from the 1510s to the 1550s. I focus in particular on the print production and manuscript exchanges of Venetian state officials Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Pietro Bembo, and Andrea Navagero, and Spanish state officials Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza. Under the custodianship of Navagero, Bembo, and Ramusio, the Library of St. Mark, donated to the Republic of Venice by the Greek cardinal Bessarion in 1468, functioned as a site of knowledge production. The gatekeeping and information management practices that these men carried out as caretakers of this politically charged library of Greek and Latin books informed their manuscript exchanges and print production. Geographic news from the Americas in the form of letters, accounts, maps, and printed works posed a particular challenge to classical understandings of the globe, and the Spanish and Venetian intellectuals examined here together faced the challenge of apprehending the new and determining the role and relevance of ancient texts such as those of Ptolemy, Plato, Pliny, and Strabo in the contemporary world. Through their histories, summaries, anthologies, and commentaries, they made news into history, curating the presentation of the Americas for their reading publics. Their published works fixed in print the fluid correspondence networks and manuscript exchanges that enabled their creation, making the private public with a great deal of mediation, selection, and suppression or selective acknowledgment of sources and dialogues. By reading the printed works together with the manuscript backstory, I reveal how these scholars pushed at the boundaries of what was expected of them as Spanish or Venetian state agents. Their curated presentation of information about the Americas obscured the porosity of intellectual exchange among Spanish and Venetian intellectuals at the time, and the extent to which the production of Americana in Venice is not just a Venetian story, but also a Spanish one.