Literary Territories: Cartographical Thinking in Late Antiquity by Scott Fitzgerald Johnson (review)

Scott Johnson offers a series of studies in what he calls "cartographical thinking." Not only does geography play an important role in late antique artistic practices, but literature also "operates in the same way that a map operates" (1): they both organize and interpret the world, condensing and emphasizing what could be known. Following Christian Jacob's work on the semiotics of ancient cartography, Johnson demonstrates how a similar aesthetic sensibility is at work not just in late antique maps, but in literature more broadly. Across languages and genres, artistic renderings of the oikoumene\, the inhabited world, rely on accumulation, tradition, and authority to create "icons of knowledge" (1). Described oikoumene\ becomes prescribed knowledge. The period's "explosion" of travel and pilgrimage literature, in particular, participates in an "archival aesthetic," where the territory traveled through becomes a container of previously scattered material that can then take on symbolic significance.

Chapters One and Two define the "literary shape of the genre of travel literature" (17) and the "aesthetic of accumulation." Johnson sets geographical literature within a larger literary trend in late antiquity: the "organization of knowledge," often through biblical or theological texts, coupled with "the related phenomenon of the sacralizing of specific holy places" (28). Pilgrimage narratives, letters, encyclopedic topography, cartography, pedagogy, and cosmology are all united by three constitutive elements: "1. the accumulation and organization of complete knowledge, or 'encyclopedism'; 2. creative two-dimensionality, with distortion; and 3. burdens placed on the viewer or reader, in terms of making use of the genre for practical purposes" (59).

In Chapter Three, Johnson returns to his earlier work on the Life and Miracles of Thekla. The chapter opens with a tension going back to cartographical thinking's paradigm, Homer's Odyssey: the particular places to which Odysseus travels become a way of discussing the entire known world. This interdependence of the local and the universal frames Johnson's analysis of LMT. Thekla's placement within and commitment to the local grounds her in a distinct region and is also "merely a point of departure" (77) for her universal authority as one of the many saints who, under Christ, govern the world.

Chapter Four, "Apostolic Geography," studies "the reception of the apostolic world as a realm of knowledge in its own right" (79), examining the parallel rises of apostolic and topographical literature in the fourth and fifth centuries. The sortes apostolorum (lots of the apostles) organizes the world for late antique writers, who assume "apostolic ownership of regions" (107), even as they discuss more recent holy women or men. Taking Egeria as representative of late antique geographical writing, Johnson shows how her travel account collects both texts and shrines, and adds an "apostolic overlay" (91) to the itinerarium models she inherited.

Chapter Five, "The Westwardness of Things," reads the ninth-century Syriac ecclesiastical historians Thomas of Marga and Isho'dnah of Basra and the way their "mental geography" of the Syriac monks organizes their blending of "historiography with collective hagiography" (115). Despite the substantial growth along the Silk Road in the fifth through eighth centuries, the ninth-century historians are "remarkably uninterested (or under-informed) about this eastward push" (115). Though both histories take place in modern-day Iraq and Turkey, most geographical or travel accounts depict westward movements toward Jerusalem, Sinai, Scetis, Syria, or Edessa. This westwardness allows the historians to link their more local "traditions of monasticism and ecclesiastical succession . . . with the broader scope of eastern Christianity" (117). By the ninth century, Johnson argues, East Syrian Christians wanted to define themselves geographically "in relation to Jerusalem and Egypt," not to the Byzantine Empire.

The book contributes to the growing interest in the production of knowledge in the late Roman world, highlights an underappreciated aesthetic, and makes a subtle argument for how to think more capaciously about late antiquity. Johnson shows late antique geographical literature to be especially creative in transforming its classical inheritance to stylize ways of knowing. These shifting organizations and representations...