Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World (review)

208 Reviews Latin homo. In a parenthesis she adds, 'Women too could do homage, although it was rare; female homage was called 'feminage' (p. 43). Oh, really? Where? Alas, there is no footnote to acknowledge the source. Dictionaries of Old French quote one instance of this word, from Brunetto Latini, Livre du Tresor, 1260, p.198: 'La femele qui est froide por le feminage qui en l i est, si est tozjors covoiteuse et desirrans de prendre' (Godefroy III, 747a; F E W III,452a; Larousse; 262b) and i t is defined asfemelete. This meaning is reinforced by its Occitan equivalent, femege, 'chaleur, appetit de la femelle pour le male' (Raynouard, Lexique roman, III, 302a). If Bouchard's statement is true, it surely deserves comprehensive exploration, an article at the very least. If it is not, then it belongs on the list of those undergraduate examination howlers placed for entertainment on the tea-room notice-board. The middle ground between professional historian and literary critic is potentially fraught with peril. Yet it need not be so: the literary scholar needs to understand the historical and political context within which a chosen work is written, and the historian needs to be mindful of the mentalite of the era as revealed in its literature. Unfortunately Bouchard has not avoided the pitfalls. Her book is neither a piece of historical analysis nor a careful literary synthesis; it is facile, shallow, glib, and contains far too m a n y unsubstantiated and generalised statements. Margaret Burrell Department of French University of Canterbury Brotton, Jerry, Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World (Picturing History 11), London, Reaktion Books, 1997; cloth; pp. 208; 36 b/w, 8 colour illustrations; R.R.P. £22.50, AUS$67.50. This is the eleventh book in a series entitled 'Picturing History'. publishers categorise it on the back cover as 'History/Cultural Studies/ Geography'. It is all these things in abundance, and more besides. Jerry Brotton is part of that exciting n e w world of interactivity between disciplines that would, until not long ago, have been regarded as separate and impermeable. As it is, there will yet be some w h o will Reviews 209 question the credentials of a scholar in an English Department writing within a specialised area of historical geography. Fortunately, the book i s a complete answer in itself: here is an outstanding achievement of meticulous research and scholarly rigour, yet animated by a method of enquiry that is enriched by being accustomed to reading texts according to literary protocols. Trading Territories is a study of early European encroachment upon and interaction with regions largely rumoured and mythologised in the west before the great ocean voyages that began in the second half of the fifteenth century. But Jerry Brotton's study takes us beyond the limits of those physical voyages of discovery into what Andrew Marvell described as 'far other worlds and other seas', regions of mind and imagination. In terms of time span, Brotton concentrates on the complex effects of navigation in one direction, as by Bartolomeu Dias around the Cape of Good Hope, with the almost simultaneous venturing in the opposite direction by Christopher Columbus; and with the binding of both enterprises in the circumnavigation of the globe by Magellan some thirty years later. What chiefly concerns Brotton, however, is not these many-times-told stories in themselves but their meaning in relation to each other and for European perceptions of place and identity in wider terms. The focus for Brotton is the mediation of those voyages cartographically through the two-dimensional m a p and the threedimensional globe. Those modes of denoting geographical space in themselves gaveriseto 'social and political change across a wide variety of spheres, including juridical, diplomatic, imperial, historical and commercial contexts within which maps and globes increasingly came to play a part' and it was from these denotations that 'many of the social and cultural hopes and anxieties of the period came to be focused.' (p. 21). Maps and globes began to stand for the space they represented by a particularly powerful form of physical synecdoche: Early Modern cartographic artefacts eloquently spoke for the riches of the realms...