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Presents the life and career of Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama focusing on a blend of the facts and legends around him.
The voyage of Vasco da Gama to India (1497-1499) was one of the seminal events of the Renaissance period. An anonymous Journal kept by a member of his fleet has long served as the main documentary source for accounts of this voyage. Strangely, there has only been one English translation of this important document, published more than a century ago. This book provides a new, updated English translation of the Journal with extensive editorial notes and appendices which encompass and reflect changes in the historiography over the last century on Vasco da Gama and his first voyage. In doing so, it examines initial Portuguese impressions when confronted by the cultures of Africa and India during this period.
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With Introduction And Bibliography By Jose Mannuel Garcia In Portuguese. English Translation By Teotonio R. D`Souza.
Writing New Worlds analyses the different ways in which travel literature constituted a fundamental pillar in the production of knowledge in the modern era. The impressive frequency of publication and the widespread circulation of translations and editions account for the leading and essential contribution of travel literature for a better understanding and awareness about the dynamics and practices associated with decoding and making sense of the prose of the world. These texts, in some cases accompanied by illustrations, covered a broad and extensive panoply of languages, grammars and ways of seeing, translating and writing new worlds. In drawing special attention to internationally less-studied sources from Portugal and Germany, the book shows how authors, scholars and artists between the 15th and 17th centuries responded to the challenges of modernity, and explores the cultural dynamics involved in grasping and understanding the New.
The volume contains 26 contributions to literature, philosophy, linguistics and epigraphy in Islamic culture, ranging from pre-Islamic poetry to contemporary prose, from the Ihwan as-Safa to the theology of Mawdudi, from lexicography to epigraphy. These papers were read at the Eighteenth International Congress of the Union Europeenne des Arabisants et Islamisants, organized by the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL) from 3 to 10 September 1996. A second volume of proceedings, that appears along with this one (OLA 86), is more concerned with questions of actuality and political organisation, including Christian minorities in the Arab world, in their relation to the Muslim environment. As such the two volumes put together, will provide to the world of learning, we may say, an overall picture of the current scientific investigations about Islamic culture and society.
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A critical reassessment of world-shaping Portuguese voyages of discovery that places these quests in historical context. The lasting impact of historic Portuguese voyages of discovery is unquestionable. The slave trade, the diaspora of the Sephardic Jews, and the intercontinental spread of plants and animals all make clear these voyages’ long-term global significance. Navigations reexamines these Portuguese quests by placing them in their medieval and Renaissance settings. It shows how these voyages grew out of a crusading ethos, as well as long-distance trade with Asia and Africa and developments in map-making and ship design. Malyn Newitt also narrates these voyages of discovery in the framework of Portuguese politics, describing the role of the Portuguese ruling dynasty—including its female members—in the flowering of the Portuguese Renaissance, the creation of the Renaissance state with its distinctive ideology, and in the cultural changes that took place within a wider European context.