Historical Atlases: The First Three Hundred Years, 1570-1870 (review)

Printed maps and atlases differ from the bulk of sources used by historians. Beyond their verbal content, they are pictorial representations of parts of the earth's surface, which must be designed, reproduced, and distributed. Their interpretation depends not only on what they portray but also on an analysis of changes in the appearance of maps, the technology of printing them, and the economics of their production and dissemination.

To this complex task, Goffart adds a further constraint—the problems associated with "specialized works marshalling geography solely to illustrate the past" (5). Indeed, not all historical atlases will do—only those containing maps which relate to the Middle Ages, as opposed to biblical and classical times (6). The author thus investigates the birth of a sub-genre in the history of cartography. His success depends upon the coherence of his project.

Printed maps appeared within twenty-five years of Guttenberg's Bible. The earliest collections were attributed to Claudius Ptolemy, whose Geography, written in Greek during the second century, contained instructions for drawing maps and the co-ordinates of 8,000 places. The realization of Ptolemy's instructions required the translation of the Geography into Latin, the decoding of his instructions, and the development of a simplified trapezoidal projection on the basis of which engravers and woodcut makers could draw regional maps of Europe, Africa, and Asia. By the late 1470s, mapmakers in Bologna, Florence, and Rome had published editions of Ptolemy—all drawn to second-century instructions and realized through fifteenth-century technology. As early as 1482, Francesco Berlingheri's Florence edition contained four tabulae novae that represented contemporary Europe as opposed to the Europe of Ptolemy's time. The presence of these maps demonstrates that Berlingheri and his contemporaries recognized the difference between current maps and historical ones.

Goffart's discussion of this phenomenon is idiosyncratic. He describes the Berlingheri Ptolemy in the middle of a paragraph otherwise devoted to seventeenth-century works (20), even though his original thesis statement suggests that editions of Ptolemy containing tabulae novae should be considered historical maps. Historical atlases also appeared well before the seventeenth century, when, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term "Middle Ages" came into general use.¹ This inconsistency casts doubt on the rationale for the author's chronological categories: the sixteenth and seventeenth, the eighteenth, and the nineteenth centuries. Each of these epochs, moreover, is treated in two overlapping chapters, one on "milestones in the origins of specialized historical atlases" and the other on individual maps (8).

Within this framework, Goffart lavishes a historian's attention to the appearance, aesthetics, and intellectual dissemination of the maps that he discusses. He adds a catalog of maps and atlases, most of which he has personally viewed, an index of maps and atlases, and an index of secondary literature.

Historical Atlases is a personal statement reflecting the author's quest for a historical cartography of a particular period. Regretably, it also reflects the shortcomings of his knowledge of cartography. He refers to map colors as if they were an integral part of woodcuts and engravings, rather than accretions subject to the whim of the owners. The same can be said of his critique of base maps, which were usually copied from earlier base maps and then updated. This volume is more useful as a catalog of the author's scholarly peregrinations than as a systematic account of the first 300 years of historical atlases.