-
Renaissance German Cosmographers and the Naming of America
- Past & Present
- Oxford University Press
- Number 191, May 2006
- pp. 3-43
- Article
- Additional Information
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Past & Present 191.1 (2006) 3-43
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Renaissance German Cosmographers and the Naming of America*
Christine R. Johnson
The name 'America' was modestly introduced to the world in 1507 by the Gymnasium Vosagense, a group of humanists in St-Dié, a small town in the territory of Duke René of Lorraine. The name first appeared in three separate, but related, works: a wall map of the world in twelve sheets; globe gores for a small sphere; and the Cosmographiae introductio, a textbook on cosmography that included as an appendix the Four Voyages of a certain Amerigo (Americus) Vespucci. The world map, drawn by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, depicts Europe, Africa and Asia on the right-hand side, stretching out over three-quarters of the map (see Plate 1). To their left, across the Atlantic, it shows two tall and narrow land masses, separated from each other and from Asia. The label 'AMERICA' appears at the lower end of the larger, southern land mass1 (see Plate 2). The small globe gores display similar land configurations, although with much less detail. The word 'America' is printed again on the long, narrow southern Atlantic land mass.2 The Cosmographiae introductio explains the reasoning behind this neologism: 'as I do not see why anyone could justly object to naming it Amerigen, after Americus its discoverer (a man of keen talents), the land of Americus as it were, or America, since Europe and Asia received their names from women'.3 [End Page 3]
Click for larger view | Plate 1 Martin Waldseemüller's 1507 world map, from the 1903 facsimile.Courtesy of the Library of Congress. |
These few lines in a brief pamphlet have provided the opening for a panoply of commentaries about the circumstances and the appropriateness of the choice of 'America' in honour of Vespucci. The stakes are high, as scholars have used the small event of the baptism of America to make claims about how the European expansion produced a revolution in European geographical conceptions and, by extension, European intellectual structures in general. In the standard narrative, the acknowledgement of the incontrovertibly new nature of America, an entity clearly incompatible with existing authorities, led to these authoritative traditions being first doubted, and then disregarded, as Europe freed itself from its stultifying dependence on inherited knowledge. When the St-Dié humanists named America and depicted it as separate from Asia, and thus as distinct from the established cosmography, they formalized the shattering of the familiar, bounded medieval world. The true 'discoverer' of America is therefore the person who enabled the recognition and acceptance of the fundamental newness of the New World, and the name of the new continent should acknowledge his formative role in reshaping Europe's world view.
What previous analysis has either obscured or distorted is the environment in which the decision to invent and retain the name America was made. The criteria now raised by scholars were neither conceived nor even considered by the name's creators and perpetuators. Instead, the naming of America demonstrates the accommodation and reformulation of existing structures of scholarly knowledge in the light of European expansion. The St-Dié humanists relied on established theories and practices of cosmographical science to evaluate and incorporate the available new knowledge, both textual and visual. Confronted with the need to create an authoritative picture of the world from their limited knowledge of the specific voyages of Amerigo Vespucci and his rival explorers, these cosmographers used a series of [End Page 4]
Click for larger view | Plate 2 Waldseemüller's 1507 world map (detail of America). |
temporary expedients and ad hoc solutions that in turn formed the new authoritative knowledge. In this article, I re-examine the story of 'America' to reveal the contingent and negotiated acceptance of the 'truths' about the new land that produced the certainty of a name. Using the naming of 'America' to illustrate how Europeans created knowledge about the newly discovered territories, I argue that the model of an intellectual breakthrough...
