ABSTRACT
Expect to meet an unusual spectacle in this section: a house, purportedly built in Nazareth, propels itself through the air, across oceans. It alights, but dissatisfied with its neighbors, uproots again before planting itself down in an obscure woodlands known as Loreto, on the Italian peninsula. This house, the Santa Casa, serves as a useful metonym for the phenomena that emerged in the period around 1500–1700, phenomena that we take to be “global” and that are the subject of the essays of this book. Like the uprooted house, the era is marked off from what came before by the increased mobility of objects and people. And just as the Santa Casa circulated in printed form, the development of new circulatory networks, both in communication and transport, led to a more tightly networked world, that is, a new “global” world.
