Michael Harney

Las ideas geográficas y la imagen del mundo en la literatura española medieval by Aníbal A. Biglieri (review)

Among the affiliated humanistic fields most indispensable to the study of medieval literature and culture is the history of geography. This is to say, not historical geography, a discipline that studies the human and physical geography of past eras, but rather the history of geography as a field of knowledge. The transition from mythic or folkloric medieval geography to the modern rationalized scientific discipline occurs as an interaction of several intellectual regimes. These chiefly include the increasingly precise and accurate body of real-world knowledge derived from travel and exploration, and the interaction of geography as an emerging science with other developing disciplines, such as cartography, geology, astronomy, and cosmography. The real demarcation between medieval and modern geographical sensibilities is not marked by the transition from a realm of lesser to one of greater knowledge. Rather, geographical modernization takes the form of a gradual repudiation of ancient and medieval geography’s encyclopedic method and mythographic proclivity in favor of the theoretical orientation of modern geography and its sister disciplines. Where ancient and medieval geography perceives a vast and picturesque earthly tableau, modern scientific geography studies a set of interactive evolutionary processes.