Evelyn Edson

World maps and Easter tables: Medieval maps in context

Abstract Medieval geographical texts and world histories have long been searched for world maps. One source which merits further exploration is the computistical or calendar manuscript, which is devoted to calculating the date of Easter. Computus manuscripts include T‐O, zonal and ‘list’ maps, as well as more complex and detailed maps. Three of the complex maps are examined here, and their form and content related to their context.

An astrologer's map: A relic of late antiquity

Abstract A Greek map of the world, which includes a windrose, zones, places in and around Egypt, and hell, is studied in reference to its context: an anonymous astrological miscellany. Other examples of this map have been found in a second context, among anonymous scholia to Theon of Alexandrias commentary on Ptolemys Handy Tables (Procheiroi kanones), which were also of use to astrologers. The selection of Egyptian place‐names found on the map provides some clue to its possible origin, while the omission of the Mediterranean as well as the port of Alexandria is significant. Evidence suggests that the original map (known today only through later copies) is of an earlier date than the texts surrounding it, and that it may be one of the earliest world maps preserved from Late Antiquity.

The Vesconte-Maggiolo World Map of 1504 in Fano, Italy

GregoryC.McIntosh’s The Vesconte-MaggioloWorldMap of 1504 in Fano, Italy, is a painstaking analysis of place-names and general design from a small group of early sixteenth-century world maps, the earliest to show the New World and the results of Portuguese voyages around Africa to Asia. He attempts to construct a stemma demonstrating how these maps are related to one another. His thesis is that the original is the Portuguese government Padrão map, a copy of which was smuggled out of Lisbon in 1502 by Alberto Cantino for his employer the Duke of Ferrara. Passing through Genoa, this map then became the basis for the King-Hamy (1502– 1503), Caverio (1503), Maggiolo (1504) and Kunstmann II (1504–1505) maps. More distant descendants include Waldseemüller’s world maps of 1507 and 1516. It should be pointed out at the outset that no two of these maps are identical. While the overall structure is similar, details vary. The maps are put together from two different depictions of the two halves of the world. The New World on the Fano map takes the formMcIntosh describes as the ‘King’ or KingHamy model, showing Greenland (Tera de Lavrador), Newfoundland (Tera de Corte Real), the Caribbean (Tera de Colonbo vocatur Antiga) and Tera de Consalvo Coigo vocatur Sana Croxe (Brazil). McIntosh also uses the rather archaic classification ‘Lusitano-Germanic’ maps for the Cantino and Caverio planispheres (a term originally coined by Henry Harisse) without explaining clearly how this model differs from the King model and why. For the Old World Henricus Martellus Germanus’s maps had already modified Ptolemy’s picture, eliminating the land bridge between Africa and Asia, a feature of the maps studied here. The King model goes further, with an extended triangular peninsula for India and a more accurate depiction of the Malay peninsula. Other developments are a smaller Sri Lanka located southeast of India, Sumatra on the west coast of Malaya, and the absence of a myriad of islands off East Asia. The changes to the Old World, says McIntosh, were based on information from Pedro Àlvarez Cabral, who returned from India in July 1501, as well as from other contemporary Portuguese explorers and the geographical knowledge they obtained from Arab pilots in the Indian Ocean. This new image was recorded on the Portuguese Padrão map, which was the foundation for the maps under discussion here. Vesconte Maggiolo, the founder of a family of mapmakers who worked in Genoa for almost two hundred years, thoughtfully signed and dated his Fano map, thus providing a solid rock in the shifting sands of early map identification. McIntosh examines every possible sequence of descent among the seven maps mentioned below, using primarily toponyms (their order, spelling and misspelling), littoral outlines and cartographic design. Examples of the last include the rectangular form of the Persian Gulf (originally Ptolemaic) and the horizontal (east–west) design of the Red Sea. Appendices to the book include lists of more than 8,000 place-names from West Africa to Brazil as shown on seven different maps. The author would be the first to admit that many problems remain, although he is confident that the primary source was a single Portuguese Padrão map from 1502, modified by each mapmaker from a variety of other sources. The book is illustrated with two maps, Fano and Caverio, as well as the compass rose in central Africa, which contains another world map, found on these two maps only. The Fano reproduction is dark and small, the Caverio clearer but also small. Since the originals were quite large, the place-names on the reproductions cannot be read, and other significant maps are not illustrated. The reader must search the internet, where the Huntington Library has posted an excellent image of the King-Hamy map. Others can be seen online, although not all in searchable formats. On the whole this is a difficult book with which to work. It lacks an index and table of contents, and writing this review required a lot of shuffling back and forth through the pages. McIntosh’s main idea was to apply the methods of textual criticism to early maps. Placenames are the primary texts, but in the case of maps the process is complicated by the visual shapes. Here he has introduced the concept of ‘design-types’. Since these forms are copied and re-copied on subsequent maps, one can use them to track their parentage and descent. Only a true portolan-chart fanatic will enjoy this book, but such a person will enjoy it very much and find it a wonderful resource and suggestive of further research.

Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps

ment not only of cartography but also the thinking behind the function of maps and their construction. There are few surprises in the catalogue, apart from the range and quality of the images. Certainly, the work will appeal to the wider audience interested in the beauty of the maps, to art historians and to others interested in the development of cartography. They will be pleased to have such excellent reproductions, often complemented by more specific detail, of this excellent collection in the one place.

The Indies and the Medieval West: Thought, Report, Imagination. By Marianne O’Doherty

Olaus Magnus’s nine-sheet woodcut Carta Marina of 1539 is justly famous as an early cartographic representation of Scandinavia, but it is perhaps even better known for its iconographic richness. Numerous vignettes illustrate northern customs (ice fishing, skiing, skating), natural history and, in the ocean, a wide variety of sea monsters. Joseph Nigg has produced an entertaining book based on the sea monsters in the Carta Marina. His conceit is an imaginary voyage through the North Atlantic on this map, sailing from one monster to the next, with twenty-two stops in all, with each creature given a short, wellillustrated chapter. Introductory chapters provide an overview of the Carta Marina and two of its better-known descendants, Sebastian Münster’s Monstra marina & terrestria plate from the Cosmographia universalis (1544) and Abraham Ortelius’s map of Iceland from the Theatrum orbis terrarum (1585). The imaginary voyage follows, each chapter keeping to a common format: a description of the sea creature (consisting mostly of text reprinted from the 1658 English translation of Olaus’s Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus), followed by three sections, ‘Ancestral Lore’, which identifies Olaus’s likely sources, both classical and medieval; ‘Map Legacy’, which describes how subsequent mapmakers copied Olaus’s imagery; ‘And Since’, which briefly discusses later authors’ belief (or lack of belief) in the particular monster. Each chapter is richly illustrated with Olaus’s images (from the Carta Marina and the Historia), and from the works of other authors. The inside of the book jacket, unfolded, contains a roughly half-size facsimile of the full map. There are only two known copies of the Carta Marina, one in Munich and one in Uppsala; both of these are uncoloured. Yet a number of coloured facsimiles have been produced. All of the Carta Marina images in Nigg’s book, including the book-jacket image, are taken from a 1949 coloured facsimile of the Munich copy. Despite using the Carta Marina as the point of focus, Nigg’s book is relatively light on cartographic content or analysis. The real focus of the book is on the monsters, not on the map, and this is not surprising given that Nigg’s prior books have been on the subject of mythical animals. It is unfortunate that the extensive quotations from Olaus’s Historia are taken from the 1658 translation, with its archaic and, to modern readers, stilted language, rather than from the excellent 1996–1998 Hakluyt Society translation, but this is no doubt a matter of copyright. Nigg’s commentaries for each monster, although brief, are reliable, and the book concludes with a reasonably extensive list of suggested further readings. Readers looking for a more comprehensive and scholarly treatment of the topic will be better served by Chet Van Duzer’s Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps, published the same year as the book under review (see Imago Mundi 66:1 (2014)). However, as a visually rich introduction to the world of sea monsters on Renaissance maps, Nigg’s book has its place, though that place is more likely to be on the coffee table than in the library.

Curious Visions of Modernity: Enchantment, Magic and the Sacred. By David L. Martin. (Evelyn Edson)

ion of the measured map and its absorption of the subjective (if only fictively) by the objective. He gets around this by a Latourian argument that the cartographic reality is socially constructed, the product of the co-operation of the cartographic and state (or imperial and commercial) processes. But in the end, for him, the ‘so-called modern map always preceded the territory because . . . territory was very different after than before the cartographic assemblage of it’. This may be a powerful antidote to IR’s presumption that political spatiality is created by political structures and world systems, and Strandsbjerg’s argument is far more nuanced than Imay be characterizing it here. (The clarity of his highly theoretical writing would have benefited in places from a stronger editorial hand.) Still I remain uncomfortable with the emphasis of the abstract spatiality of the modern map, whether socially con-spatiality of the modern map, whether socially constructed or not, as if thiswere all thatwas going on. However useful this may be to our understanding of how or whether geopolitical orders rise and fall, in my view such an assessment of the modern map, valid as it may be on its own terms, draws too sharp a line between modern and nonmodern mapping. It paints over, for example, the persistence of the pictorial and the narrative in modern mapping. These considerations are certainly beyond the scope of this book, but they articulate a caution against overly reductive ideas about the impact of the cartographic revolution on how human beings understand and act in geographical space, and how they map it out. Of course, Strandsbjerg makes similar arguments against those who see globalization as something entirely new. He effectively shows that the history of cartography argues otherwise. Despite my reservations, or perhaps because of them, I found this to be a most provocative work and a worthy addition to the literature on the geopolitical history

Medieval Maps of the Holy Land. By P. D. A. Harvey

Strabo’s Geography and to sea itineraries, attempting to draw a not too easy line between these last two. Then the author examines the role of nautical experience in geographical descriptions of the sea (‘De l’expérience de la mer au texte’). The second part (‘Représentation du monde et expérience maritime’) first shows the discrepancies between features such as capes, islands and bays, their use by seamen, and the poor accuracy of their description in Strabo’s Geography (‘Caractère culturel des représentations’). Then, through a comparison with borders between land territories, Jean-Marie Kowalski stresses the specificity of seascapes and the difficulties geographers face when they try to mark them out (‘Frontières et limites des espaces maritimes’). Thereafter a tentative definition of seascape is attempted through a catalogue of examples (‘Organiser le discours sur les espaces maritimes’), specifically in Homer and Strabo (‘Comparaison des représentations des espaces maritimes chez Homère et Strabon’). These lead to the main conclusion: the vocabulary may not have changed, but the objects that are described have become more varied and more complicated. The third part (‘Un discours irréductible à celui de la carte et de la géométrie’) tries to understand how ancient geographers laboriously worked out their images of the landscape of the sea from data in itineraries. The book is illustratedwith 46 sketches, maps and appendixes (a Greek lexicon of the sea, indexes of ancient authors, toponyms and ideas, and a bibliography). The book is rather disappointing, with the author’s intentions obscured by a mixture of debatable editorial choices. After having read this book, I am still not convinced that one should consider from the same perspective Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (eighth century BCE, at the latest), Strabo’s Geography (first century BCE), Dionysius’ Periegesis (second century CE), and a collection of sea itineraries of dubious and various dates. Altogether, the book is curiously nonhistorical: when maritime borders are to be dealt with, one should not avoid political questions such as peace treaties between states; and Latin literature and Roman history should not be forgotten since one has to deal with a time when Greece was a Roman province and the Mediterranean the mare nostrum. The structure of the book is unsatisfactory. Chapters and subchapters vary in length (from two to 20 pages). Many examples are insufficiently explained, which results in a rather scrappy collection of Greek stories relating to the sea, most of which have already been told and commented on. Kowalski tries to enlarge on his examination by bringing in other fields of investigation such as Pacific ethnography and geographical psychology (the description through affordances, after J. J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston, 1979), and this is one of the interesting parts of the book). The book should have been more carefully proofread (p. 10, lᾖμνη for líμνη; p. 18, quotation repeated in the footnote; p. 22, Arômate for Aromate; p. 92, Nikonia and Ophiussa are on the Tyras and not on the Ister; Cresus’ kingdom bordered the Halys (p. 186, l. 20) and not the Tanaïs (p. 186, l. 14)). Some mistakes are to be attributed to the author himself: the Adriatic sea cannot be the Gulf of Corinth or Alcyonid Sea, and Agathemere’s text should have been corrected, as already suggested by K. Müller in 1861 (Geographi Graeci Minores 2: 473–74). The author’s figure of the Black Sea (fig. 36) appears tome to be founded on a misunderstanding of Strabo’s description and Aujac’s figure (fig. 37) is the accurate one. Although one will find great interest in the documentary parts of the book (80 useful pages of a dictionary of Greek geographical terms and ancient geographers, and an abundant bibliography) and enlightenment in the wider discussions noted above, I do not know to whom I could recommend this book.