The Sixteenth-Century Venetian Celebration of the Earth's Total Habitability: The Issue of the Fully Habitable World for Renaissance Europe

Abstract

In the contexts of Venetian cartographic primacy and the publication of G.B.Ramu-sio's unique collection of travel accounts, this article examines the implications of the growing recognition of the entire earth's navigability, accessibility, and hence habitability--a recognition that shattered the traditional classical notion of zonal, partitioned confinement, in which three zones were too cold or too hot for human habitation. The ringing confidence of Ramusio and his circle regarding the total habitability of the earth, expressive of a new global consciousness on the part of Europeans, depended at least as much on Platonic philosophy and its belief in the universalizing plenitude and goodness of a rational creator as upon cartographic, geographic precision and empirical exploration.

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