Download PDF | Cartography In Antiquity And The Middle Ages Fresh Perspectives, New Methods (Technology And Change In History) (2008)
341 Pages
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Emity Axsu is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of California, Davis. Her special interests are Late Antiquity, the twelfth century, and the classical tradition. She is the author of The Normans in ther Histories (Boydell & Brewer, 2001), and “Imperial geography and the medieval Peutinger map” (Jmago Mundi 2005).
RayMOND CLEMENS is Associate Professor of History at Illinois State University. His research focuses on the archaeology of book and map production. With Timothy Graham, he is co-author of Introduction to Manuscript Studies (Cornell, 2007).
Lucy Donxw is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at University College, Oxford. She specializes in perceptions of sacred space during the Middle Ages, and has published “Mosaici pavimentali medievali nell’ Italia settentrionale e i loro rapporti con la liturgia” (AISCOM, Tivoli, 2005).
Evetyn Epson is Professor Emerita of History at Piedmont Virginia Community College, Charlottesville, Virginia. Her books include Mapping Time and Space: How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed their World (British Library, 1997), and (with Emilie Savage-Smith), Medieval Views of the Cosmos: Picturing the Universe in the Christian and Islamic Middle Ages (Bodleian Library, 2004).
Tom Exuiott is Director of the Pleiades Project at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He specializes in Roman history, geography and epigraphy, and in humanities computing.
Parrick Gautier Datcue is Directeur de recherche (Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes, Paris), and Directeur d’études (Ecole pratique des hautes études, Sorbonne). He specializes in medieval representations of space (texts and images), and his many publications include: La “Descriptio mappe mundi” de Hugues de Saint-Victor (Etudes Augustini-ennes, 1988); Carte marine et portulan au XIIe siécle (Ecole francaise de Rome, 1995); Géographie et culture. La représentation de Vespace du VIe au XLle siécle (Variorum, 1997); Du Yorkshire a ?Inde (Droz, 2005).
BenyAMIN Z. KEDAR 1s Professor of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He specializes in the history of the Crusades, comparative history, and the use of aerial photographs as historical sources. Among his recent publications are: The Changing Land between the Jordan and the Sea: Aerial Photographs from 1917 to the Present (Jerusalem/ Tel Aviv, 1999); Franks, Muslims and Oriental Christians in the Latin Levant: Studies in Frontier Acculturation (Variorum, 2006).
Maya Kominxo is currently moving from a faculty position at Sabanci University, Istanbul, to one at Princeton University. She specializes in Byzantine art history. Her publications include “The map of Cosmas and its influence” (Mediterranean Historical Review 2005).
Nartauia Lozovsky is a Visiting Scholar in the Office for History of Science and Technology, at the University of California, Berkeley. She specializes in the transmission and reception of classical texts on geography, ethnography and history in the Middle Ages. Her publications include ‘The Earth 1s Our Book’: Geographical Knowledge in the Latin West, 400-1000 (Michigan, 2000).
YosseF Rapoport is a Research Fellow at the Khalili Research Centre for the Art and Material Culture of the Middle East at the University of Oxford. Medieval Islamic history forms his principal research interest. He is the author of Marriage, Money and Dworce in Medieval Islamic Society (Cambridge, 2005).
Emitig SAVAGE-SmITH is Professor of the History of Islamic Science at the University of Oxford. Her recent publications include Medieval Views of the Cosmos: Picturing the Unwerse in the Christian and Islamic Middle Ages (with Evelyn Edson, Bodleian Library, 2004), and Medieval Islamic Medicine (with Peter Pormann, Georgetown, 2007).
CAMILLE SERCHUK is Professor of Art History at Southern Connecticut State University. She specializes in late medieval French art.
Among her publications is “Picturing France in the fifteenth century: the map in BNF Ms Fr 4991” (Imago Mundi 2006).
RicHarp TALBERT is Kenan Professor of History and Classics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Roman maps, worldview and associated materials and ideas form his principal current research interest. He edited the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World (Princeton, 2000), and (with Kai Brodersen) Space in the Roman World: its Perception and Presentation (LIT, 2004).
JENNIFER TRIMBLE 1s Associate Professor of Classics at Stanford University, specializing in Roman art and archaeology. Her book Replicating Women: Portrait, Place and Power in the Roman Empire is forthcoming.
RicHarp UNGER is Professor of History at the University of British Columbia. He specializes in economic history and the history of technology. His books include A History of Brewing in Holland, 9001900: Economy, Technology and the State (Brill, 2001), and Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (University of Pennsylvania, 2004).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The present volume derives from a meeting originally conceived by Richard Talbert as a means to bring together historians who study classical and medieval cartography. ‘The venue was the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and the context a meeting in an annual series there which for the past thirty years and more has addressed current themes in medieval studies. We are keenly aware that neither this Thirty-Fifth Medieval Workshop in October 2005, nor the volume emerging from it, would have been possible without generous support furnished in a variety of ways. As joint organizers and editors, we are much indebted for funding contributed by the Office of the Vice-President, Research, at the University of British Columbia; the Dean of Arts; the President’s Committee on Visiting Lecturers; the three Departments of History, English, and Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies; and the Committee for Medieval Studies.
Our speakers unselfishly embraced the workshop character of the meeting, and used it accordingly as a long awaited opportunity to exchange ideas and practices across disciplines, continents and millennia. Members of the Committee for Medieval Studies rendered invaluable assistance in organizing the meeting, as did Professor Leanne Bablitz, co-organizer in the Department of Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies. To her, and to all, we offer our warmest thanks. Brill’s reader, Prof. Paul Harvey, evaluated the complete set of contributions in a most positive and helpful manner. Last but not least, we greatly appreciate that Brill is publishing the volume in 2008, the year that marks the twenty-first anniversary of Harley and Woodward’s inspiring History of Cartography, volume 1.
Richard Talbert, Chapel Hill, North Carolina Richard Unger, Vancouver, British Columbia September 2007.
INTRODUCTION
Richard Talbert and Richard W. Unger
There has been growing recognition that the study of classical and medieval cartography is typically being pursued by two separate groups of scholars who feel nothing but mutual goodwill, yet in practice seldom cross paths to exchange results with one another. Hence the primary aim of the October 2005 meeting was to create such an opportunity, so that all who participated could gain a deeper sense of their colleagues’ research and of how it might enrich their own. A gratifyingly broad and varied range of backgrounds, perspectives, materials and methods was represented across a vast arc of time and space. The diverse character of the participants’ activity, so clearly evident from the papers they have contributed to this volume, well reflects the origins of their research and indeed of the history of cartography itself, with its roots in nationalism and in the history of science as much as of art, not to mention—among other sources— the passion of collectors.
Without doubt, the entire history of cartography has undergone a remarkable transformation during the past quarter-century. There was special concern, therefore, to mark the advances made above all since the 1987 publication of Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, the opening volume in the pathbreaking and still ongoing series The History of Cartography conceived and launched by Brian Harley and David Woodward. The intention was not so much to ‘correct’ this volume’s scholarship, but rather to appreciate the value of the foundation which it lays, as well as to offer instructive illustration of how its fresh thinking has proven the springboard and inspiration for new departures in the field. The broader scope that Harley and Woodward’s expanded vision of cartography and its significance opens up is not merely confined to the use of iconology and theory borrowed from postmodernism.
In fact, those methods are now regarded with serious scepticism by some historians of cartography. Rather, the deeper and more durable impact of the 1987 volume lies in its vision of maps as sources with unrealized potential to advance understanding of past societies and their cultures, especially when an overly rigid definition of ‘map’ is abandoned and when such materials are interpreted with due recognition for their contemporary context. To persist in contemplating maps for little more than their accuracy or beauty from a modern Western perspective was an outmoded and disappointingly blinkered approach which Harley and Woodward had the creative boldness to supersede, to universal benefit. At the outset—as we now recognize in retrospect—even they did not anticipate the scale and productiveness of the seismic shift that they were setting in motion.
The volume’s papers can naturally be divided into those with a classical focus, and those with a medieval one. The apparent separation between the two chronological periods is in many respects artificial, an arrangement inherited from the organizational structure of academic institutions over the last two hundred years. One of the goals of the meeting and of this volume, accomplished with visible success, was to diminish the significance of this divide. Such an attempt to appreciate the connections linking the Roman Empire and medieval Europe reinforces a widespread trend in recent historical scholarship. Indeed, for over twenty years now it has been a special concern of the Medieval Studies program at the University of British Columbia to equip medievalists with a profounder understanding of the classical past, while stimulating classicists to explore the implications of the Roman heritage through the centuries that culminate with the Renaissance.
The volume’s opening pair of papers survey the study of classical and of medieval maps respectively. ‘These papers reach both forward and back in time to illustrate connections across the entire period under consideration, while reflecting upon the current state of study and reporting some significant recent work. Richard Talbert lays out the role of The History of Cartography in encapsulating the lines of approach adopted for the history of Roman cartography up to 1987. He points to changed perspectives and emphases of recent years which hold out clear promise for the future. Patrick Gautier Dalché travels an even longer and more tortuous road, roaming from the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance, as well as reaching back to the intellectual roots of high medieval maps in late Antiquity.
His analysis of shifts in cartographic outlook and purpose over many centuries draws from an exceptional grasp of scholarship. He points to literary sources as vital resources for historians of cartography, especially in their quest to understand mappaemundi. Those complex products of the high Middle Ages, with their varied images, have attracted intensified interest in recent years, aided by improved representation and more rigorous study. Not only has their reproduction in print become fuller, sharper and less costly, but digitization and dissemination through electronic media have also begun to make a marked impact.
The volume’s papers about ancient maps all share a greater or lesser preoccupation with the reconstruction of that period’s lost output, as well as with its original use and function. Here, recourse to the exploitation of digital technology has emphatically proven its worth. Jennifer ‘Trimble addresses the monumental wall map of the city of Rome, only scattered segments of which survive. As she reveals, to achieve a keener sense of how it appeared to its viewers proves a fruitful, and rewarding, means of reassessing its purpose. Tom Elliott demonstrates the ways in which digital technology can advance our engagement with premodern cartography that manifestly departs from adherence to the norms taken for granted today, using as his example the peculiarly shaped Peutinger map of the Roman world and its land routes. In the following paper, Emily Albu contends that this map is a medieval creation, not—as has been widely accepted—an ancient one, and she seeks to establish where it may have been produced.
Focus on the early Middle Ages in particular bridges Roman and undeniably medieval cartography, and further serves to identify the linkages between the two. This said, there is no clear line of division between the two periods, a point superbly illustrated for the history of cartography by the next pair of papers. In the first, Emilie SavageSmith and Yossef Rapoport together report on an extraordinary recent find with far reaching consequences. The Book of Curiosities, with its rich cartographic material, may have had naval or commercial purposes, or both. It is impossible to be sure of the author’s goals or his sources from the remarkable text and illustrations. The maps in this book incorporate both classical learning and new knowledge, and form a priceless extension to the known body of Islamic cartography.
In the second paper, Maja Kominko examines the maps associated with the work of an author notorious for his claim that the world is flat. As a result, for the past two centuries Cosmas Indi- copleustes has been cited as (false) proof of the supposedly primitive understanding of geography prevalent in an era much swayed by religion. Kominko maintains that Cosmas’ map of the world in fact derives from a separate stream in late classical Greek cartography. Ideas about the curvature of the earth or lack of it were not among its special concerns. Rather, Cosmas’ map is merely one effort among others to represent the world in a way consistent with both classical knowledge and Christianity.
The diversity of maps of the high and late Middle Ages—creations based to a significant degree on those varied classical roots—1is manifest from the maps next discussed by Benjamin Kedar, Natalia Lozovsky and Lucy Donkin. Kedar penetrates the so-called renaissance of the twelfth century, and through a different cartographic tradition. As he shows, in twelfth century western Europe there flourished mapping that was both non-Christian and non-Muslim, as well as reliant upon Biblical sources for both its questions and its answers. Specifically, Kedar discusses the cartography of Rashi, a Jewish mapmaker, whose distinctive and little known work draws upon both Christian and Muslim traditions.
Lozovsky examines the relationship of words to maps, in particular how maps became vehicles for repeating and amplifying the written word. Recent scholarship has pointed to connections between maps and rulers. The latter grasped the value of maps for propaganda and the dissemination of information, as well as to record and interpret knowledge. Lozovsky underscores the persistence of ideas about the Roman Empire, even once such conceptions no longer reflected reality. Maps provided one useful means for the persistence of those ideas to be articulated. Even if her claims about the longevity of an imagined Roman hegemony do not prove to win full acceptance, her argument serves to emphasize the continuity of ideas about space, as well as mapmaking practices, across the first Christian millennium and beyond. Donkin focuses on floor mosaics, a context for maps in the Roman world and similarly, as she shows, in the medieval one too. Such placement has increased these maps’ chances of survival, making them a valuable type of source even if the character of the medium gives rise to problems of interpretation. Donkin not only identifies a medieval connection with the classical tradition of siting maps on floors, but she also finds linkages between different medieval mosaic maps with methods and information transferred from one to another. Evelyn Edson brings to bear her encyclopedic knowledge of medieval maps in exposing various ways in which late classical ideas influenced the maps of the high Middle Ages. The formation of Christian identity in the late Roman Empire furnished cartographers with an agenda for some centuries. Over time, maps might appear to be different, and might expand in scope, size and complexity; even so, according to Edson, the agenda for mapmakers was already set in the early seventh century and before.
In the case of maps, as with many aspects of the intellectual life of medieval Europe, the influence of those writers who categorized, catalogued and organized knowledge for Christians may have waned in the high Middle Ages, but it did not disappear. While many signs of their sustained influence remained visible, by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries new ideas about maps and new functions for them made an impact on cartographic products. In their papers, Raymond Clemens and Camille Serchuk both address a much more rapidly changing late medieval world. Clemens explores how maps could be integral tools in education, or at least how they were seen as such in fifteenth century Italy. ‘The period when Renaissance ideas about art and learning were starting to influence mapmaking also saw a significant increase in the uses of maps as well as in the number of their users. The connection of maps to cosmology, as found by Clemens in the work of one Florentine writer, was normal. At the same time, there were signs that the embedding of theology, which was so much a part of many earlier maps, was waning. Hence the cartography of this period differed from maps of earlier traditions. Serchuk explores some new uses and users of maps along with the distinctive practical trends of the fifteenth century. The rise in the political functions of maps during the Renaissance is already well known. Less noticed is the increasing use of maps for legal disputes. Serchuk brings the eye of an art historian to questions of who made maps in fifteenth century France, how the artists gained their commissions, and how they were paid for their work. What appears in the maps reflects who made them and why. The new functions of the representations of lands were influential too, as Serchuk argues from certain fifteenth century images designed to illustrate historical works. Maps unquestionably had varying purposes, but these differences did not prevent practices from one type of map being transferred across a range of products. The same artists, it appears, created a range of map types.
By the fifteenth century, as Clemens and Serchuk show, mapmaking was without doubt taking on a new character.
As was only to be anticipated perhaps, the conference amply confirmed the increasing need to replace The History of Cartography volume 1 with a new edition. This recommendation seeks to cast no aspersions upon the volume. On the contrary, it underlines the imspiration which it has proved to be—and will continue to be—since its publication in 1987. Fortunately, Matthew Edney, current director of the ongoing project begun by Harley and Woodward, was able to attend the conference. Speaking about plans for the future, he readily endorsed the need to revisit the project’s initial publication once the first edition is completed in its entirety.
Meantime the conference papers, as revised here for publication, show the study of maps to be at once varied and cohesive. The variety is both chronological and methodological. The expertise of contributors ranges from art historian to computer scientist. An open approach to the history of maps calls for a large set of skills, and these are ably deployed here both on a broad front and in detail. Especially striking, and very welcome, is the expanding range of methods represented. At the same time there is also a cohesion to the contributions, as there was to the discussions which formed a vital part of the conference itself: Participants shared the conviction of Harley and Woodward that maps, as cultural artefacts, represent the thinking of their time, and should therefore always be interpreted as products of specific periods and places. In consequence, the history of cartography must intersect with that of art, politics and the intellect, indeed with the whole history of culture, both high and popular.
The claim can fairly be made that the history of cartography offers a model guide for approaching the past. Not least in this volume, it decisively demonstrates that the separation of the mythical Middle Ages from a classical Antiquity crafted by Renaissance thinkers is false. To use the Renaissance as a marker for the end of an era in mapmaking nonetheless remains valid, insofar as it was then that thinkers conceived the idea of a unique ‘middle age’. Humanists in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries believed that they were ushering in a new era, and in cartography—to some degree—they did. Between the classical and medieval worlds there should be no such division, however, at least not for the history of cartography, nor perhaps elsewhere either. For scholars studying maps, as this volume attests, themes of continuity, connections and adaptation now promise to be among the most rewarding. New methods and technologies, together with fresh discoveries of materials, will allow the progress set in motion by Harley and Woodward to be sustained and expanded. Consequently, to an unprecedented degree, an awareness of cartography and its value will be integrated into the mainstream of historical study.
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