Africa in the News in Renaissance Italy: News Extracts from Portugal about Western Africa Circulating in Northern and Central Italy in the 1480s and 1490s

Autor: K. J. P. Lowe
Rok vydání: 2010
Předmět:
Zdroj: Italian Studies. 65:310-328
ISSN: 1748-6181
0075-1634
DOI: 10.1179/016146210x12593180344298
Popis: This article addresses issues surrounding news of Western Africa, from Senegambia to the Congo, coming via Lisbon to the Northern Italian courts and Florence during the reign of King Joao II of Portugal (1481–95), who developed a policy of exploration and alliance along the African coast. It examines this news from a variety of standpoints, paying attention to both transmission and content, and relates the key concepts of newsworthiness and news stories to Renaissance news from Africa in order to gauge Italian perceptions about the worth or value of Africa. The article analyses in detail excerpts from four quasi-private letters (published here as an appendix) sent to correspondents in Italy in the 1480s and 1490s, giving news of previously unknown parts of Western Africa or previously unknown Africans.
Databáze: OpenAIRE