The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography throughout History (review)

The history of cartography, like so many histories of other sciences, has taken a long time to evolve from a triumphalist, positivist narrative of advances in a discipline to a more thoughtful account of its essence and development. Jacob clearly demonstrates how the history of cartography lies at the intersection of history, anthropology, semiology, geography, and cartography. His approach involves "looking at maps for themselves, as artifacts, as constructions, as a complex language, rooted in society's visual culture" (xiv).

Eschewing a chronological organization, but always forthcoming on the timing of the maps under discussion, Jacob divides his argument into four stages: (1) the "discovery of the [cartographic] object, its properties, and its visual and intellectual effects; (2) the visual components of a map, which include "geometry, nonfigurative geographical drawings, and incrustations of iconography"; (3) "the writing and language on its surface"; and (4) the combined effects due to "the itineraries and the interpretations of the reader [and] the intentionality and the visual artifice of the cartographers themselves" (8–9).

A work like this one cannot be absorbed in a single sitting. Indeed, translating the book from its earlier French version required nearly fifteen years and the services of both a literary translator and an expert in early modern maps. During this time, Brian Harley and David Woodward launched the monumental series, History of Cartography (Chicago, 1987–), which is only now reaching the halfway point in its publication, despite the untimely demise of both the original editors.

Nonetheless, the subtlety of the author's arguments will well repay the readers' efforts. The first chapter examines the broad array of maps from drawings in the sand to wall drawings to individual printed maps to atlases, applying to them the terminology of visual culture. The next chapter considers every visual component possible on a map from its borders to the vital distinction between its lines, which suggest particular itineraries, and its surfaces, the forms of which provide overall impressions of a map's contents.

Chapter 3 takes up the verbal component of maps, going beyond discussions of lettering and toponymy to that other primary visual element in mapping, the point. In a particularly brilliant passage, Jacob explains that "[t]he point is a 'shifter' between space and language, between what can be seen and what can be said, between perception and memory" (202). Finally, he contrasts the purpose of the mapmaker and the map reader: "For the conceiver, it is a construction, an assemblage of partial data, a graphic translation of measurements and observations, a patient labor of juxtaposition, of repetition of previous drawings, of their critical verification. . . . For the viewer, it is a completed process; the scientific scaffolding has been removed; the map is an image producing a visual illusion, an effect of reality" (273). He concludes that "the map is a graphic prosthesis of the intellect, . . . the sign of recognition between those who share the image of the world that it proposes" (362).

The author and his translators have considerably expanded our ability to discuss what maps do and how they change.