The imaginative landscape of Christopher Columbus (review)

144 Reviews materials are largely jurisprudential and ecclesiological. Notwithstanding some methodological tension between theory and practicaltextualreconstruction, the result is arichand valuable work. It is written with exemplary clarity, it shows tremendous range and command of primary and secondary materials, and it provides an improving perspective on all the major themes it develops. Fasolt makes a strong case for William's works helping to establish an agenda of debate for the Conciliar Controversy and remaining serviceable thereafter. He does show that the traditional conspectus of debate over the Conciliar Controversy has had as much to do with modern problems of ecclesiology as with the medieval world. H e is also able to illustrate that there is an arbitrariness in the contexualising processes of much intellectual history. It would be a fascinating topic to compare William's theories with Marsiglio's. This would add extra dimensions of difficulty to the problem of contextualization. In sum, this is a suggestive and intriguing work of historical reconstruction, but it is also in its religious and historiographical respects an exercise in de-mythologizing the past. Conal Condren Department of Politics University of N e w South Wales Flint, Valerie I. J., The imaginative landscape of Christopher Columbus, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1992; cloth; pp. xx. 233; 2 figures, 13 plates; R.R.P. A U S $? The figure of Christopher Columbus has become so associated with his encounter with the Americas that it has become difficult to extricate him from N e w World culture. H e has become an honorary American and a representative of the frontier, Utopian, tragic and heroic age his voyages initiated. Like Christ, he marks with his life the end of one era and the inauguration of another. In 1992, the year dedicated, so it seemed, to the sole purpose of commemorating thefivehundred years since thefirstColumbus voyage, many historians worked hard to rebut the American and Renaissance image of Columbus and re-present him as an individual with a European and a medieval past. Valerie Flint's book is not so much about Columbus but rather about his intellectual landscape. She draws for us a detailed picture of the mental universe through which Columbus travelled. It is a fascinating account full of startling representations of Columbus's preconceptions and conclusions about his encounters with the East She meticulously constructs this mental world out of medieval maps and geography, Columbus's own reading of medieval sources, and what she refers to as 'Sea Stories'. Her scholarship is, characteristically, beyond reproach; although perhaps Flint knows Columbus's sources considerably better than he did himself. Reviews 1A. 145 What was the impact of these varies ideas on Columbus's world view? Here Flint is cautious. At the end of her account of Columbus's attitude to the marvels of the east she discusses the nature of the influence of his medieval sources on both his vision and his reporting. Columbus always resisted the evidence of his own voyages and claimed to have discovered not a N e w World but the less surprising East of Marco Polo and the early Franciscan missionaries, the region of the Earthly Paradise. W a s this self-delusion the result of disappointment Hint asks, or was Columbus so permeated by the images of his particular cosmology that he indeed failed to see America? Was he a fool, locked into a Cathay his reading had taught him to expect or a knave, who used his sources to convince others that he had achieved a sea route to the East? Hint has too much respect for the historical idiosyncrasy and indeterminacy of her subject to provide an exact answer to this question, but her book does suggest many new approaches to it some more convincing than others. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on Columbus and his Christian world. Columbus scholars, to w h o m Hint is a generous and informed guide, have long been intrigued by the nature of Columbus's Christianity. Again, was he a fool, deluded by too much reading of the Apocalypse and the prophecies of Joachim of Fiore, or a knave, who used whatever evidence came to hand to procure financial and other support...