Scott Fitzgerald Johnson, Literary Territories: Cartographical Thinking in Late Antiquity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xiv, 195.

Abstract

Nothing might seem farther apart than the self-enclosed space of a dusty archive and the image of a pilgrim journeying from place to place towards an ever-shifting horizon. And yet, Scott Fitzgerald Johnson tells us, in Late Antiquity pilgrim and archive were not antonyms, but synonyms, if only metaphorically. Both images, according to J., symbolize the way in which knowledge was collected and organized. More specifically, they express that painstaking ‘aesthetics of encyclopaedism’ so characteristic of much of late antique literary production, whereby the world itself was imagined and used as ‘a symbolic container for many types of knowledge’ (p. 1). Literary Territories can be situated within a fast-growing literature on perceptions of space and the geographical imagination in the pre-modern world. While over the past decade the literary territories of classical Greece and Rome have been accurately surveyed (see, for example, Purves 2010; Thalmann 2011; and de Jong 2012, among others) and both western and Byzantine medieval geographical imaginations are being increasingly mapped out (see, for example, Lilley 2013; Angelov et al. 2013; Nielsson and Veikou 2021), Late Antiquity has remained largely uncharted terrain. J.’s book thus brings a welcome and much needed contribution to the burgeoning field of the (pre-modern) spatial humanities. In the words of the author, Literary Territories attempts to build bridges between ‘a familiar Greco-Roman culture’ and ‘the often surprising and exotic worlds of Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages’ (p. 136). This is achieved through the exploration of continuities (and discontinuities) of the geographical/archival metaphor as a way for organizing knowledge in different literary genres—from early geographical writing to pilgrim and hagiographical accounts. Spanning seven centuries of human history (2-9 c. CE), multiple cultures and languages (including Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Syriac), and a geographical area stretching all the way from Europe through modern Iraq, the book nonetheless does much more than providing a literary bridge between