Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth (review)

When in 1994 Alessandro Scafi ordered images for Mapping Paradise from the Vatican Library, he encountered a difficulty: the staff in the Library could not find the earthly paradise on the maps and so could not supply him with the reproductions he was seeking. This problem, Scafi explains, clearly illustrates the theme of his book: the history of mapping something that has always been regarded as 'elsewhere', 'out of time', or indeed 'nowhere'.

Scafi starts by considering definitions of paradise that, in his work, represent the Western Christian view. He outlines previous studies of the history of paradise on maps and suggests that, with the current revisionist history of cartography, it is timely to reconsider the mapping of Eden. He argues that as the premise that maps are always a reflection of the culture in which they are produced is becoming widely recognized, so maps of the world that show paradise are not necessarily any less objective or more fanciful than modern maps that do not show paradise: medieval and Renaissance maps have to be judged in terms of the world outlook of the time. Scafi then looks at the way paradise is described in the Bible, points to the hazards of translation, and discusses early attempts to locate paradise in space and time.

The main part of Mapping Paradise discusses, chronologically, the conditions that made it possible to represent paradise on maps, and in particular on medieval mappae mundi. Scafi shows how paradise was included on T-O maps, on the late-eighth-century Pseudo-Isidorean Vatican map, and on a contemporary map by Beatus of Liébana to give a visual and geographical form to the typological and literal reading of the holy scriptures. It was the structure of mappae mundi that made it possible to map paradise, which Scafi describes as an 'event/place', as places were shown according to their contiguity rather than their astronomically defined locations. Paradise and other 'event/places' could only be shown on maps that demonstrated how different layers of history were piled on geographical space.

This theme is explored further in Scafi's chapter 'The Heyday of Paradise on Maps', in which he shows how twelfth- and thirteenth-century mappae mundi offered an encyclopaedic view of the world, structured by mankind's historical pilgrimage from Eden to heaven. Scafi demonstrates, with several well-known mappae mundi, how to read them and how paradise fits into this interpretation. East is at the top: the edge of the world at the start of time. The remote past and distant east are linked with contemporary and familiar western regions of the Mediterranean and northern Europe, as well as with the six ages from Adam to the present and four world empires. The present and final age coincides with the Mediterranean basin. At the bottom, the western edge of the physical world is marked by the Straits of Gibraltar or the Pillars of Hercules. History is dominant over geography: the medieval concept of time was more sharply defined than that of space. Scafi also points out that some maps referred indirectly to paradise, for instance by showing the four rivers of paradise, linking known regions to the remote Garden of Eden.

Scafi continues by looking at thirteenth-century maps, where the location of paradise was becoming a specific geographical conundrum as the study of astronomical geography was being revived. Again, there is a useful discussion of contemporary thought, and Scafi relates map-making to this background. While paradise continued to be shown on maps in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the link between historical and geographical facts became much weaker. A growing interest in contemporary geography, influenced by the development of the nautical chart and the study of Ptolemy, made it harder to show paradise, and it had less visual impact as the orientation of world maps changed. The Garden of Eden became a 'place' rather than an 'event/place'. Scafi challenges recent scholarship...