Making Contact: Maps, Identity, and Travel (review)

One must pity any editor endeavouring to undertake a volume that deals with 'contact' in some sort of meaningful way. It is an enormous topic informed by an enormous number of resources. Though they are in no way attempting to be exhaustive, the editors of this collection, consisting of eight papers presented at the Medieval and Early Modern Institute conference at the University of Alberta in October of 1998, have focused their work by limiting the term. As may be expected, particularly given the culturally specific periodization implicit in the selection of medieval and early modern situations, 'contact' here involves only those circumstances in which there are European participants. There are no discussions of Native-Native contact in the Americas, or of similar non-European moments of contact in the Middle East, Africa, or Asia.

Despite this restriction, 'contact' must be taken in its most capacious sense for a true appreciation of the collection. In Scott D. Westrem's intriguing discussion of the 'Bell' mappamundi (c 1450), for instance, what is at stake is not 'contact,' but the diverse discourses that inform cartography and the representation of the southern (African) other in fifteenth-century Europe. Similarly, 'contact' in David Frick's exploration of the liturgically and culturally weighted determination of occasion in a multicultural and multi-faith early modern Vilnius seems to rely not on the moment of contact so much as on the enduring effect of cross-cultural interaction that comes with a 'contact zone' (Mary Louise Pratt's now-famous term). In a city of Lutheran, Calvinist, Uniate, Greek Orthodox, and Jesuit Christian divisions, it is not precisely clear whether this is a situation of newcomers interacting with a host community or whether these divisions are evidence of internal sectarian development, though there are also Tatars, Germans, and Jews in the mix.

As is perhaps becoming clear, Making Contact is less about making contact than about exploring articulations of European identity. As Lesley B. Cormack and Natalia Pylypiuk write in their introduction, identity 'is inconceivable without difference.' Contact in this collection consequently becomes a means for differentiating and recognizing European identity.

Although the collection comes up somewhat short of Cormack and Pylypiuk's positioning of the work as interdisciplinary - of the twelve individuals associated with the work, ten are literary scholars, and seven of these are from English departments - there is an admirable breadth of vision in the chapters. The papers are divided into three groupings that neatly correspond to the book's subtitle: (1) 'Spatial and Temporal Maps: Mappaemundi and Calendars,' (2) 'Identities and Subjectivities: Jews, Buddhists, Christians, and Vagrants,' and (3) 'Travel to the New World: The Early Modern and the Postmodern.' These three sections are bracketed by an introduction by Cormack and Pylypiuk, and an engaging and cogent afterword by Jonathan Hart. Rich and genuinely useful notes accompany each essay.

Though somewhat uneven, the volume is a valuable contribution to the study of identity and contact. There are some particularly strong papers in the collection. Westrem's and Frick's articles, mentioned above, are illustrative and engaging. Steven F. Kruger's exploration of medieval Christian scholars' confusion with the evolving nature of Judaic thought, which they had more or less frozen in its biblical articulation, is sophisticated and powerful. In a particularly intriguing study, Linda Woodbridge examines the ways in which English views of indigenous populations in the 'New World' were informed by anxieties about the poor and transient elements of the home population.

The essays of Making Contact will be useful to scholars investigating individual issues of European contact in the period, but care must be taken to query the points and conclusions of some of the papers, particularly in the third section. In the end, Making Contact marks a valuable contribution to a vast field of study, especially on the strength of its better papers.