Alessandro Scafi

Orbis disciplinae: Hommages en l’honneur de Patrick Gautier Dalché. Edited by Nathalie Bouloux, Anca Dan and Georges Tolias

thinking about terrae incognitae occasioned by the discovery of the New World, and the emergence of Terra Australis nondum cognita (not yet known) on the maps and globes of Francesco Rosselli, Johannes Schöner and Oronce Fine, before pausing to consider in detail the southern land on Gerard Mercator’s famous 1569 world map. After brief treatment of the maps of Giacomo Gastaldi and Abraham Ortelius, Stallard moves on to the Dutch explorations of the coasts of New Holland in the first half of the seventeenth century and outlines their gradual impact on cartographic representation. He points out that the failure of explorers to locate Terra Australis did not cause its disappearance from world maps. Its traces—and their provocation to renewed exploration—remained until a flurry of eighteenth-century French and English expeditions in the 1760s and 1770s, culminating in Cook’s second voyage (1772–1775), decisively put paid to the theory of a vast southern continent. The fairly light-touch approach to footnoting and the informal tone of Stallard’s book suggest that it is aimed at a broad audience, even if it lacks the period detail and grainy character sketches now characteristic of popular histories. From a scholarly point of view, the general lack of engagement with texts in original languages and the neglect of non-Anglophone scholarship—no mention, for example, of the magisterial Le continent austral: hypothèses et découvertes (1893) of Armand Rainaud—are regrettable. For all that, Stallard is a well-informed and independent-minded guide to the efflorescence and final extinction of the southern land. His work contains a number of useful correctives to previous scholarship. The first of these is his refutation—made with more detail in Terrae Incognitae 42 (2010)—of the claim that classical and early modern belief in antipodal lands derived from a theory of ‘equipoisure’, whereby the weight and extent of land in the southern hemisphere should match that of the northern hemisphere, so that the earth remains balanced on its axis. As he shows, such a theory began to be expressed frequently only in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: it is not evident in classical works, and in the sixteenth century only emerges clearly in the cosmographical thought of Mercator. The possibility that the theory informed sixteenth-century formulations of Terra Australis should not be ruled out—some version of it must, I think, have influenced the maps of the mathematician Fine—but its nature and effects should not be blithely assumed. Equally notable is Stallard’s criticism of the annexation of Terra Australis to the narrative of the discovery of Australia. As he points out, if Australia is considered in some sense the descendant of Terra Australis, then so too are New Zealand, Vanuatu, the Kerguelen Islands and Tierra del Fuego (not to mention the Antarctic itself), since all these places at one stage or another were incorporated into the edifice of the southern continent. Terra Australis did not ‘become’ Australia, despite the deceptive similarity of nomenclature. Perhaps because of Stallard’s insistence on this point he is notably less interested than previous commentators in the sometimes sulphurous debates about the earliest European discovery of Australia (and its possible representation in formations such as ‘Jave-lagrande’ of the Dieppe school of mapmakers). And it may be that such debates, still smouldering a decade ago, have now run their course. Ultimately Stallard’s interest is not in the mapping of Australia, but in the product of the geographical imagination that was Terra Australis, and it is in exploring the status of the southern continent as at once hypothesis and fact, imagination and science, that the strength of this book lies.

Apocalyptic Cartography: Thematic Maps and the End of the World in a Fifteenth-Century Manuscript. By Chet Van Duzer and Ilya Dines

A Christian prophecy made in the fifteenth century warned that between 1600 and 1606 the four horns of the Antichrist—cruelty, deceit, cunning and imitation of the deity—would radiate from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth, conquering the carnal, the greedy, the proud and the hypocritical and persuading all mankind to follow him. The prophecy is found in a fifteenth-century German manuscript, accompanied by a strikingly original map of the world on which four huge peninsulas, oriented to the four cardinal directions, stretch into the ocean and stand for the Antichrist’s four horns that will deceive all nations. The map that so intriguingly imposes religious symbolism on cartography is pictured on the cover of Apocalyptic Cartography by Chet Van Duzer and Ilya Dines. The authors found it in a long-forgotten manuscript, MS HM 83, now in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, that was made in 1486–1488 almost certainly in Lübeck, Germany. Van Duzer and Dines’s book is entirely devoted to this single manuscript, of which they have discovered the significance both for the history of cartography and for the history of apocalyptic thought. Maps illustrate the sections on geography and astronomy (fols. 1r–8r; 13r–18r) and, interestingly, a treatise on the Apocalypse (fols. 8v–12v); the last folios of the Huntington manuscript contain material on astrological medicine (fols 19r–25v). The author of the texts and maps is unknown. The manuscript was briefly described in library catalogues in 1925 and 1989, but this is the first study exclusively devoted to it, with the specific aim to bring attention to its apocalyptic cartography. After a description of the manuscript’s content, Van Duzer and Dines discuss its historical context (fifteenth-century Lubeck) and its authorship. In their view, it is likely that the figure behind this unusual, intriguing collection of texts and maps was a friar-doctor from Lübeck named Baptista, sent by Pope Pius II (r. 1458–1464) to the Holy Land to care for Christian pilgrims. Baptista stayed there for some twenty years and, the authors argue, could well be responsible for the heterogeneous material contained in the codex. The manuscript’s last section on astrological medicine, which the authors of the book wish other scholars might be inspired to study in detail, would point to a medical doctor such as Baptista as the author. Having discussed the manuscript’s context and the clues about the identity of its author, Van Duzer and Dines move on to investigate in detail its geographical sections and the treatise on the Apocalypse, supplying transcriptions, translations and full commentary about the maps and the accompanying Latin texts. A remarkable series of maps (all reproduced in the book under review), illustrates the transformations that the world was supposed to undergo during the Apocalypse. The anonymous author based his prophecies on the Book of Revelation and, adopting anti-Islamic medieval beliefs, saw Mohammed, as the precursor of the Antichrist and the spread of Islam following Rome’s decline as the ultimate threat to Christendom before the Last Days of the world prophesied in the Bible. Through text and maps, the author explained the various stages of human history from the seventh to the late sixteenth century. According to the manuscript’s apocalyptic chronology, the final defeat of Christian Europe would take place in 1570, with Islamic power stretching all the way to the edges of the earth, as indicated in the various world maps (including the one on the book’s cover) illustrating the Antichrist’s domination of the earth. The end of Islam’s global rule would be brought about by the Last Roman Emperor and the final triumph of Christ, with the Last Judgment occurring in 1651 (1661 on the map). At this finale, the blessed would be separated from the damned and the universe completely renewed. The fifteenth-century author illustrated every stage of the world history he described with a map. Thus we see, in Van Duzer and Dines’s account, maps of the new earth that would replace the destroyed world, of the gates of Paradise, and of the abyss of Hell—all provided with dimensions. But what interests Van Duzer and Dines are the sources from which the manuscript’s author might have drawn his inspiration. They point, for example, to a passage in the thirteenth-century theological compendium by Hugh Ripelin of Strasburg as the basis of one of the world maps.

All Space Will Pass Away: The Spiritual, Spaceless and Incorporeal Heaven of Valentin Weigel (1533–1588)

The cosmology of Valentin Weigel (1533–1588) offers an example of the changing understanding of space and the universe between medieval and modern times. The aim of this essay is to explore his discussion of the nature of space in the treatise Vom Ort der Welt (On the Place of the World, 1576) in relation to his views concerning the Christian heaven and the resurrected body. Adopting the distinction between “locative” and “utopian” tendencies in religion drawn in the field of religious studies by Jonathan Z. Smith, Weigel’s views on earthly space and historical time in relation to heaven and eternity bear the hallmark of a utopian vision. Weigel was an advocate of the true Christian faith—received as a gift of the Holy Spirit acting within the soul and forming a spiritual brotherhood—as opposed to the visible and organised Church, and combined mystical, Lutheran and Paracelsian theories to provide an original way to envisage the relation between time and eternity, space and infinity, human realm and divine dimension. He envisioned the material and visible world as floating against the infinite abyss of God, saw the Kingdom of Heaven as accessible from within and radically opposed spirit and matter, light and darkness, freedom and bondage.

Sacred Crossroads: Landscape and Aesthetics in Contemporary Christian Pilgrimage

Different Christian denominations attribute different values and theological meanings to pilgrimage practices and the geographies that surround them. In the Roman Catholic Church, pilgrimage tends to focus on journeys to places associated with the shrines of saints, holy relics, healing and revelation. Reformed Churches, grounded in a theology of direct access, have traditionally rejected pilgrimage practices as corrupt and unnecessary. Nonetheless, over the last 20 years Protestant Christians have increasingly re-engaged with pilgrimage with a strong emphasis on meditation and mobility. Orthodox pilgrimage primarily on the shrine and the physical act of veneration of relics and icons, largely downplaying the role of the journey. In each instance, pilgrims move through and interact with landscape and attribute different values and functions to it. While most literature on pilgrimage has usually focused on the journey to reach the shrine, the concept of landscape has been is largely ignored. We argue that in all the three above-mentioned Christian denominations landscape and aesthetics play out in different ways and to different pilgrims’ experiences. This chapter explores the significance of landscape in contemporary Christian pilgrimage through three different case studies: the Cave of Saint Benedict at Subiaco, Italy; the Isle of Man and the Greek Orthodox rock-monasteries of Meteora, in Thessaly. Each study approaches landscape from a different denominational and geographical perspective, destabilizing traditional binaries such as nature and culture, meaning and performance, tourism and pilgrimage.