The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain (review)

Scholars in various fields will welcome Ricardo Padrón's engrossing study, The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain, which embarks upon the ambitious project of charting the complex interrelation between the new science of cartography and Spain's gradual "mapping" — both physical and intellectual — of its ever-burgeoning New-World empire. While simultaneously a presentation and an analysis of the development of cartography in the Hispanic world during the sixteenth century, Padrón's work admirably marks the interconnection between maps and other kinds of texts that have a "crucial cartographic dimension" (26). This is part of the author's broader project of developing the thesis of the influential Mexican historian Edmundo O'Gorman that "America" was not discovered, but invented. Padrón carefully establishes his case that cartography and empire are inseparable, by showing how the work of sixteenth-century Spanish intellectuals in numerous fields contributes to the construction and mapping of "America" in the Spanish consciousness.

In his first chapter, Padrón discusses the growth of cartography from medieval mappaemundi to the newer Renaissance maps that reflect the changing geometric rationalization of space in the European consciousness. In particular, Padrón focuses on the function of "metageographies," as defined by Martin Lewis and Kärin Wigen: "the set of spatial structures through which people order their knowledge of the world: the often unconscious frameworks that organize studies of history, sociology, anthropology, economics, political science, or even natural history" (26). This provides the underpinning for his own project of analyzing sixteenth-century Spanish historical narrative, and illustrates "why it cannot be ignored in any discussion of the invention of America" (21). Maps "join history, literature, painting, architecture, and many other kinds of cultural endeavor to create a mutually reinforcing, albeit partially fictional, geography, one that locates and characterizes both self and other" (21). So, too, historical narratives, by means of description, both characterize and emplot the relationship between the self and the other, "by mapping the regions in which their stories unfold" (21). The locus, then, in which iconographic and discursive literatures coincide is the act of description, which is deceivingly prosaic: "But 'description,' like 'emplotment,' entails the encounter between data and expectations, between observations and culturally contingent assumptions about the production of meaning. While 'emplotment' shapes time into narratives, 'description' draws boundaries, making places out of disparate locations" (21).

Of further interest is Padrón's explanation of the particular importance of the study of sixteenth-century Spanish Americana, despite "the relative scarcity of Spanish maps and the Spanish practice of keeping them in manuscript form" (12). Sixteenth-century Spanish cartography and historical narrative bear witness to the moment when Europe awakes from its seeming disinterest in America — the moment when cartographers of the Hapsburg court first employ their fledgling science in mapping the boundaries of Spain's newly-acquired empire. By studying cartographic evolution in the Hispanic context, we are offered "an ideal site for examining the emergence of the map in the imagination of empire" (20). This process may, in turn, provide scholars with "insights that may be more difficult to come by in the cartographic efforts of later empires" (13).

Consideration of the gradual process of adaptation of the new cartographic conceptualizations in Spain is the subject of chapter 2, in which the author presents the work of court cosmographers and cartographers such as Pedro de Medina, Alonso de Santa Cruz, Juan López de Velasco, and Pedro Esquivel. Padrón traces the shifting influences of the medieval, linear conception of space and the Ptolemaic concept of abstract space that announces the coming of the Renaissance as they are echoed in historiographical texts such as Medina's Arte de navegar and Martín Fernández de Enciso's Suma de geografía. He concludes that the transition from the medieval to the Renaissance conception...