ABSTRACT
The story of Europe’s expansion into and across the Atlantic Ocean in the sixteenth century is all too often conceived in terms of political ambition, economic gain, the agency of uncommonly fortunate or visionary actors such as Columbus, and technical advances (in navigation, cartography, shipbuilding and indeed public administration and finance), which together enabled nations such as Spain and Portugal to discover, subdue and rule a network of territories not only beyond their traditional borders, but also beyond the known world or oikoumenē of the Greeks and Romans. This concern for material and human factors, which is common to the practice of history in our time, neglects the incredible novelty of the very idea of expansion into a real geography unimagined by the Ancients.1 As a result, although it is commonplace to cite the opportunities and optimism of the Renaissance, one need also recognize that this “freedom to” make one’s own way was attended by trepidation wrought by the disintegration of the medieval world-system and by “freedom from” the certainties of classical and Scholastic auctoritas. If Baroque ornamentation was spurred on by a “fear of the void,” as some have argued, it therefore stands to reason that the new horizons of the Renaissance were not merely the forward projection of inherited concepts and imagination, although these continued to play an important role, but also, on an intimate and intellectual level, a blank-or, more properly, erased-slate, due to the discrepancy of observation and experience from what medieval Christian society called “revealed” or “received” wisdom.
