Earthrise

Abstract

This article uses Franciscan history to explore an alternative approach to global history. Following Benjamin Lazier’s observations about ‘Earthrise’, which showed that images of the world have been entangled with intellectual and political discourses, this article explores the Franciscans’ own Earthrise perspective which can be traced in the spiritual and mystical writings produced in the late Middle Ages. The aim of this article is not only to contest the kind of periodisation which has seen the global turn and ‘global era’ as peculiarly ‘modern’, but to suggest that any study of the ‘global’ must incorporate an analysis of the multilayered nature of that concept. It suggests that the global is not so much a scale as an idea, and considers how the hyper-local place of the body can be a site for realising a global vision.