The New World in Early Modern Italy, 1492–1750. Elizabeth Horodowich and Lia Markey, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. xvi + 346 pp. $125. - Europa e America allo specchio: Studi per Francesca Cantù. Paolo Broggio, Luigi Guarnieri Calò Carducci, and Manfredi Merluzzi, eds. Studi e ricerche, Università di Roma Tre 34. Rome: Viella, 2017. 396 pp. €34

Despite the ecological, economic, social, and political dimensions of this impact, the debate has tended to focus on the intellectual and cultural aspects, what Rosario Romeo in his excellent Le scoperte americane nella coscienza italiana del Cinquecento of 1954 termed “consciousness.” When, in the mid-1490s, the Milanese humanist at the Spanish court, Peter Martyr of Anghiera, began writing the Orbe Novo, in what amounts to the first informed history of the discovery and colonization of the Western Indies, he meant to emphasize that the world revealed by his friend Columbus was unknown to the ancients, not to predefine an American exceptionalism. The handsome volume edited by Elizabeth Horodowich and Lia Markey reassesses the cultural impact of discovery by examining the specific role of the Italian peninsula—at the heart of the European Renaissance but only indirectly involved in the process of colonization.