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Reviewed by:
  • The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France, and: The Face of the Earth: Natural Landscapes, Science and Culture
  • Mike Leggett
The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France by Tom Conley. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, U.S.A. 2011. 392 pp., illus. Paper. ISBN 978-0-8166-7448-0.
The Face of the Earth: Natural Landscapes, Science and Culture by SueEllen Campbell. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2011, U.S.A., 334 pp. Trade. ISBN: 978-0-520-26926-2; paper and e-book ISBN: 978-0-520-26927-9.

Politics, and (therefore) national and personal identity, are at the core of these two publications. The analysis of the remarkable period of European (and therefore world) history during the early modern period of the 15th and 16th centuries is discussed in the first book and provides the call for the kind of topographic descriptions compiled during the early part of the 21st Century, the topic of the second book. Then as now, proliferation of technology and political change provide the background to these accounts—overtly in the first, occluded in the second.

Since the time of the cosmographer Ptolemy, 1,500 years before the early modern period, cartography, like many other technologies, had been held subservient to the principalities of warlords and the belief systems centered on the Church of Rome. The technologies emerging in the 15th century—printing, perspective drawing, written forms of the vernacular, scientific method and other matters of the Renaissance—began the process of rolling back superstition and the power vested through religion.

Maps are of fascination for our quotidian moments and occasionally become essential for survival (even) to those on the move. A map confidently organizes data gathered from the physical world, and we accept its greater knowledge and authority as expressed in neutral appearances. We have only to remember the colors applied to groupings of countries, and projections favoring their placement in the frame, to know that the reality is otherwise. These realizations, a placing of oneself in the world, are the maps of the mind at the center of Tom Conley’s fascinating account.

He begins by providing a window onto an arcane world (not unlike our own though of a different era) and the inexorable processes through which knowledge was extended beyond the court and the Church of Rome. The focus is on the various kingdoms that were to become the French nation, although the overall project employed “European” experts of the day moving (and being moved) to the research and production centers. Earlier travel writings, complete with woodcut “snaps” of scenes and activities sold as well then as they do today. But these lacked uses as tools to soldiers and traders, camp followers and mercantile pioneers—what was required was greater accuracy and brevity.

Individuals such as Oronce Finé are traced as they think their way through from the cordiform, “whole-world” map view, alerted to the affordances of “the grid” by both mapmakers and typographers, to regional, almost localized renditions. Writings, from itineraria way-sheets to the sojourns of Rabelais’s characters, concomitantly raised the desires of the traveling classes and [End Page 104] their expectations of adventures to be had abroad, in the imagination and as experience, on the real roads and byways described in word and image. The bounds of the worldview began to spread with the continuing colonization of the New World and, “in the singularization of experience that affects cartographic writing,” in the island book, or isolario (described as the beginnings of ethnography by 20th-century scholar Claude Lévi-Strauss). Andre Thevet’s La Cosmographie Universelle took a form that layered in all manner of fact “that refuses to concede to an atlas structure,” the precursor of other written forms (from Swift to the present-day television documentary or celebrity adventure?).

The shift from woodcut to copper-plate technology permitted advances in the acuity of the reproduction of drawings, but the discipline of the atlas asserted itself in the work of Bouguereau, in a perspective form and viewpoint that would be recognized by users of current Internet map tools. The royal commissioning of this, like...

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