The World Map, 1300–1492: The Persistence of Tradition and Transformation (review)

Evelyn Edson surveys the depiction of the inhabited world from religious mappaemundi exhibited in church to the discovery of the New World in ways that dramatically revise the relation between medieval and Renaissance maps in The World Map, 1300–1492. The book’s ambitious longue durée challenges the modernity of mathematical techniques of projection of Ptolemy, and places it in the light of curiosity about the world’s order and a crisis in attempts to synthesize sea charts with traditional mappaemundi. Edson describes how mapmakers themselves opened their “imaginations and their maps to new lands” in ordering the ecumene or inhabited world (vii) at the same time as they lent trust to nautical charts. Her work revises the relevance of Ptolemy’s work as a basis for understanding the inhabited world, and provides a new geography and genealogy for world maps in Europe. This study deserves wide readership not only for its careful synthesis of much recent work, but for framing an argument about how early modern globalism transformed curiosity about the created world in a scope far more ambitious than most monographs on the history of cartography. Edson solidily bases her claims on encyclopedic thumbnail sketches of world maps of varied media of manuscript and print to illuminate shifts in the concerns they represent.

Edson begins with a famous case of the plurality of mapping forms that she interprets as a crisis in the traditional world map. Andrea Bianco’s 1436 world atlas juxtaposed three maps: a Ptolemaic planisphere and mappaemundi “in which Christian theology is made visible” (9) with a marine chart designed “for those who wish to sail by compass” (7). The parallel use of diverse mapping offers an entry point to trace different forms of trajectories among such global mapping. Starting from maps that show a Christianized view of world history in thirteenth-century mappaemundi of circular form that tie geographic knowledge to moral and allegorical interpretation on the basis of scriptural and historical evidence, Edson examines how marine charts made in Genoa, Majorca, and Venice posed a “challenge to the traditional world-mapping format” by giving prominence to coastal outlines and rivers rather than a traditional division of the continents imbued with religious meaning (113), as “space traveled became a different sort of space” (59), rich with directional information, measurement, and orientation able to accommodate the “cartographic view” (105) diffused in travel accounts from the Polo merchants to apocryphal letters from the Kingdom of Prester John. Such maps gained increasing independence from texts.

Much of Edson’s argument for continuities in world mapping rests somewhat precariously on a survey of later world maps. Edson argues that the use of world maps as containers for descriptions of global variety and diversity left early mapmakers less inclined to Ptolemy’s lack of concern for geographic particularities and open to an elastic sense of conventions as they adapted nautical charts. The Venetian Fra Mauro used other resources of nautical charts to craft a map of startling accuracy about 1450, critiquing the utility of Ptolemy’s prescriptions and placing a chorographic map of Paradise outside the inhabited world. Edson’s detailed scrutiny of the context of this map is at the heart of this book, taking as much space as Ptolemy’s Geography, which she finds far “less open to innovation” than nautical charting because its precepts were rarely grasped by fifteenth-century readers (135). This may be fitting that Fra Mauro remains at the fulcrum of a study looking back to religious mappaemundi and forward to continuous terrestrial projections. Yet this unique world map is hardly symptomatic of a broader relation between navigational charts and world maps.

Despite the geographic variety of mappaemundi, nautical charts, and transitional world maps she surveys, Edson removes many of these artifacts from a social context. Edson seems justified to challenge the distinctions drawn among typologies of mapping, like nautical...