Cartographic
Humanism. The Making of Early Modern Europe
Author Katharina N. Piechocki
Published Chicago 2019: University of Chicago Press
Number of pages 311 p.
Price € 40,92
ISBN 978-0-226-64118-8
language:
English
Reviewed for H-Soz-Kult by Isabella Walser-Bürgler, Ludwig
Boltzmann Institute
for New Latin Studies, Innsbruck
(translation by Roland Geiger and Mr. Bing)
Katharina Piechocki's well-researched study of the European
ideas of the 16th
century presented another milestone in early modern European
research. The
interdisciplinary value of this study cannot be overestimated.
It merges the
history of ideas, science and politics in such a convincing way
with New Latin
philology and folk-linguistic literature that the strictly
monodisciplinary
approach to the subject must probably be fundamentally
questioned.
In terms of content, the author makes it her task to trace the
cartographic
"invention" of Europe in the 16th century. Before 1600, it is
argued
in the introduction (p. 1-25), Europe was no more than a vague
geographical
concept, marked by unclear internal and external borders. In the
course of the
hegemonic, imperialist and colonialist aspirations, however,
this concept took
shape and thus prepared the European discourse of the 17th and
18th centuries.
As the driving force behind this development, it is the
cartography that
stylizes it as an instrument of European self-reflection. It was
only through
cartographic attempts at location that Europe was able to become
a european
leader from the end of the 15th. In the 19th century in the
ever-changing cosmopolitan
reality – changed by Columbus's crossing of the Atlantic (1492),
Vasco da
Gama's circumnavigation of the Cape of Good Hope (1498),
Magellan's
circumnavigation of the world (1519-1522) and Copernicus's
introduction of the
heliocentric world view (1543) – to find anew and even learn to
understand.
However, the focus of the study is not geographical maps in the
narrow sense
(if at all, they serve only to supplement the actual argument),
but literary
and scientific "images of Europe". The cartographic development
of
Europe is illustrated by five central texts of the 16th Conrad
Celtis' Quatuor
Libri Amorum (1502), Maciej Miechowitas Tractatus de Duabus
Sarmatiis (1517),
Geoffroy Torys Champ fleury (1529), Girolamo Fracastoros
Syphilis sive Gallicus
(1530) and Lus de Camées' Os Lusadas (1572). Two positive
observations are made
of Piechocki's handling of the early modern Discourse on Europe:
first, the
texts open up to readers a spatial connection between Germany,
Poland, France,
Italy and Portugal on the one hand and between Europe and
America or Asia on
the other, which has so far received very rarely attention and
comparative
treatment in this form. Secondly, the texts are not the typical
examples of a
Christian or monarchist European consciousness, which have been
being
re-enacted for decades in scientific discourse without much
increase in
knowledge.
In the main part of the study, Piechocki devotes a substantial
chapter to each
of the five texts. The first chapter (p. 26–67) examines Conrad
Celtis's
attempt to create a "new" Europe by letting the love-sick
protagonist
of his cycle of eletia wander along the northern, eastern,
southern and western
borders of the German Empire. While Nuremberg is becoming the
navel-gazing
capital of the empire and the centre of contemporary map
production, the borders
in all four directions establish historical-cultural relations
with the rest of
Europe. Special mention should be made here of Piechocki's
impressive detailed
philological work, on the basis of which she considers Celtis'
linguistic and
metric finesse to be an _expression_ of his innovative european
consciousness.
In the second chapter (p. 68-106), the author Maciej
Miechowita's Latin
description of Eastern Europe and Asia Minor is the first early
modern border
manifesto. She vividly and conscientiously analyses how
Miechowita rejects the
definition of Europe's eastern border (at the time the Don and
the mythical
Rhipaemountains) and instead raises Crimea in analogy to the
insular border
fortifications in the west of the continent to the eastern
border. The terms
'border' and 'borderland' are examined conceptually, as are the
apparent
stability and immobility of Europe's borders.
The third chapter (p. 107-147) discusses the area of Europe from
the somewhat
unusual point of view of Geoffrey Tory's French-language
treatise on the
standardization of the French alphabet. The connection to the
European
discourse arises on the one hand from the idea that letters as
the smallest
graphic units form the alphabet in a similar way to the graphic
units of a map
of the continent of Europe. On the other hand, Tory sees the
process of
Europeanization as a cultural _expression_ of the inclusion or
exclusion of
Hebrew, Greek and Arabic texts, whose alphabets in turn would
have been the
godfather of the French alphabet.
The fourth chapter (p. 148-184) focuses on Girolamo Fracastoro's
Latin
reflections on the border between Europe, the old world, and
America, the new
world. Piechocki interprets Fracastoro's back-and-forth push to
separate
continents from each other, taking into account the global
threat of syphilis,
as "syphilitic cartography." With Fracastoro's opinion that all
land
masses are connected underwater and that the coastlines are in
constant motion,
the physician also challenges the common concept of the
continental border.
Piechocki's analysis of Fracastoro's puns around the terms
"unda"
(wave) and "unde" (where) are of central importance.
The fifth chapter (p. 185-229) critically reassesses the
Portuguese epic of Luís
de Camões in the light of the dark side of contemporary
cartography. Using the
ecphraseis of the Indian Ocean, Piechocki illuminates
cartography as an
instrument of European colonization. Indeed, by using them to
Europeanize the
southern hemisphere (quite literally, by the geographical
reflection of the
Indian Ocean with the Mediterranean or the southern hemisphere),
the European
identity was affirmatively transferred to the conquered
territories or the
exercise of European colonial power justified.
Overall, Piechocki's study is a complex contribution to the
study of the
understanding of Europe in the Renaissance. Illustrative
illustrations (mainly
early modern maps and frontispize) loosen up the quite demanding
reading. The
fact that the formation of Europe is not described in any of the
chapters as a
linear development is only one of the essential points that sets
the study
positively apart from many other studies on early modern
European
consciousness. The fact that the geographical and spatial
_expression_ of the
European discourse has so far lagged far behind ideological
conceptualizations
and is now gaining new impetus from Piechocki's ambitions is
another plus
point. In addition, although this monograph is never explicitly
mentioned by
the author herself, it may be seen as a serious examination of
the reception of
Ptolemaic geography in the 15th and 16th centuries. This is
reflected in almost
every chapter, where it serves as an intertextual template.
A single negative aspect stands out, but it is due not so much
to the author's
work as to the publishing habits: the illegible handling of the
"Notes" (p. 241-296). The references attached to the study prove
to
be extremely impractical compared to conventional footnotes,
especially since
there is no additional bibliography. So if you are looking for a
specific
reference or even want to deal more thoroughly with selected
primary
quotations, you first have to fight hard and without any clues
through the
reference list. However, this does not detract from Piechocki's
impressive
research contribution, which in a way re-measures the wide field
of early
modern European research.
Citation
Isabella Walser-Bürgler: Rezension zu: Piechocki, Katharina
N.: Cartographic
Humanism. The Making of Early Modern Europe. Chicago 2019.
ISBN 978-0-226-64118-8, In: H-Soz-Kult,
17.03.2021, <www.hsozkult.de/publicationreview/id/reb-95467>.
