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One final question is worth dwelling on further, by way of a conclusion to this introduction: the chronological starting point of the present book. The three existing volumes of Art in Theory did not extend back into the Renaissance period. They opened with early attempts to establish the place of art in the wider realm of the humanities at the moment of the inception of the modern Academic system in the mid‐seventeenth century. However, by the time work on the present collection began, it had become abundantly clear that no comprehensive account of cross‐cultural interaction in the sphere of art and material culture could ignore the earlier period. The understanding of the European Renaissance has been transformed over the last several decades by its opening out, away from Italy. The conception has now been extended, not only to northern and central Europe but also – and inescapably from the point of view of the present project – to geographical locations beyond Europe. The so‐called Age of Exploration, and in particular the ‘discovery’ of the Americas, urged itself as a point whose exclusion could not have done other than render the present project largely groundless.

Yet just as, albeit on a smaller and more local scale, the emergence of the Academic system in the European arts depended on the renewed encounter with classical antiquity presupposed in the very notion of a ‘re‐birth’/‘re‐naissance’, so the Renaissance ‘Age of Exploration’ itself was predicated on important earlier cross‐cultural encounters. In looking for a starting point in this context, one arrives inexorably both at those earlier contacts between the geographical extremes of the Eurasian landmass and on their subsequent interruption as a result of geopolitical developments in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Notwithstanding the dangers of infinite regress, it was as a result of these considerations that the decision was taken to begin the present anthology with a short selection of texts dating from before the Italian Renaissance and the contemporaneous late‐fifteenth‐century inception of the ‘Age of Exploration’. Hence our beginnings with a glimpse of the mythical riches of Constantinople at the moment of the Crusades, the accounts of the very first European travellers to the Far East in the age of the Pax Mongolica, and the abiding myth of Prester John, the Christian king in the heart of Asia. These four texts all date from the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, immediately before the Black Death and the temporary collapse of what Janet Abu‐Lughod has called the pre‐modern world system. From that point onwards, after the first four texts of Part I, our selections fall within the parameters of the emergence, the maturity, and perhaps now also the decline of the European‐dominated capitalist world‐system.