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Introduction: Spatial Concepts, Medieval Context
- University of Minnesota Press
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From Antiquity onward, there exists an inaugural relation between geography and history. Confirmed by the modern era’s most famous of cartographers, Abraham Ortelius, or the travel writer Samuel Purchas, who both made of geography the eye of history, however, this well-loved sisterhood often obscures that other intimate relative of geography, literature. Narrative, especially, was for the ancient geographer both a source and a medium of representation, much in the manner that developed again in the Renaissance in what we familiarly know as humanist geography, producing new and surprising overlaps and hybrids. These geographic engagements with literature have been studied extensively, often brilliantly.1 In relation to Iberia, in particular, the literature of the age of discoveries has received much attention, although until very recently, developments in the discourse and study of the history of cartography had not been part of the discussion, and even less in direct relation to literary genres, aside from the articulations between history and fiction (whether in relation to politics, racism, colonialism , etc.), which have provoked a continuous critical discussion, pointedly in the genres of the chronicle and the relación.2 People in the Middle Ages were not unaware of these relations between geography,history,andliterature,andtheyelaboratedthecorrelationbetween these discourses through various established genres or by incorporating them into new formulations. This book seeks to investigate these relations through a particular geography, that of the island, by putting together two specific and well-defined genres of the late medieval period, one pertaining to literature and the other to cartography, in order to assess the import of spatial configuration in narrative fiction of the period. The book of chivalry and the isolario or book of islands are coeval: that is, they emerge, develop and fade into history at almost exactly the same time, and crucially, they xi Introduction Spatial Concepts, Medieval Context xii Introduction cross over from manuscript into print culture, bridging and evincing the technological challenges posed to a genre in order to accommodate new media, exploit new features, and address new audiences all the while keeping to a certain tradition and format that made them immensely popular. These two genres, moreover, make a particular geography the focus of their structure: the island. Islands have a very specific and long tradition in both cartography and literature. The period that I study here, however, is of special interest in this regard because specific genres emerge centering on islands. If island fictions have a continued and prolific tradition to our day, perhaps even more specialized than the book of chivalry itself in the genre of robinsonnades, for instance, or in fantastic literature, there is no comparable cartographic genre that emerged to substitute or take up the specific project of the isolario . Perhaps its only possible continuation may be traced within prose fiction itself in the numerous maps of imaginary islands that accompany literary works, from Thomas More’s Utopia to Jules Verne’s L’Île mysterieuse to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and the myriad islet fictions that one can associate with them. There, however, the archipelago is lost from sight, and the emphasis on the single, often fantastic island is what prevails . By contrast, it is this fictional openness, fiction’s very possibility but also its theory, that is particularly linked to insularity and systematically articulated in the late medieval period in the genres of the book of chivalry and the isolario. In placing the two disciplines of literature and cartography side by side, I want to suggest that the overlaps are not mere coincidences, but historically specific strategies that can be traced to structural concerns. Moreover, their parallel study can be useful to distinguish solutions, problems, and theorizations common to both discourses that can lead to productive discussions in either discipline. Another striking parallel between these two genres, the book of chivalry and the isolario, is that they are the immediate forerunners of what can be called the major modern genres of each discipline: the modern novel and the atlas. In the spectrum of possibilities explored, in the many successful and failed attempts at structure or style that book of chivalry and isolario present, one might also find, I contend, new perspectives on the anchoring, lacks, and ambitions of both novel and atlas. [34.227.191.136] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 16:07 GMT) Introduction xiii This book is thus one that will dwell on geography, understood in a vast sense, to inquire into how a period thought about a space through...