The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain (review)

Among the most famous paintings in the Museo del Prado hangs a large canvas by Velázquez entitled La rendición de Breda, sometimes known as Las lanzas. In the foreground of the painting, Velázquez depicts the impressive culmination of a great military course of events: the transfer of the key to the city of Breda from the Dutch army to the Genoan-born commander of the Spanish forces, Ambrosio Spínola. Behind them, in the maplike background against which this action is set, the smoke of war rises from the landscape, bordered by a checkered flag and framed by the vertical lances that have made the painting famous. The work could well have been a point of departure for The Spacious Word by Ricardo Padrón, which deals with both cartographical practices in early modern Spain and with the maplike qualities of a number of early modern Spanish texts, the so-called chronicles of the Indies most prominent among them. But if the Velázquez image had been the focal point of this study, the author might have reached very different conclusions from the ones he urges in this provocative and wide-reaching book. For whereas The Spacious Word seeks to demonstrate the affinities between early modern mapping and the “cartographical prose” of this same era, Velásquez brings together the visual form of the map and the representation of grand deeds in a way that allows us to recognize their separate historical roots even while they converge to make an impressive view of action and its place.

How then does Padrón regard the affinities between the mapping practices of the early modern world and the “cartographic prose” of the chronicles of Indies? He argues in a twofold way. First, he claims that the representation of space in an abstract, gridlike form, which we have come to regard as normative for maps, was not at all widespread in the early modern world. On the contrary, he suggests that the large-scale development and regularization of what we conceive as “modern” mapping practices happened much later than is often supposed. “Abstract” mapping was the province of a few experts, and hardly played a significant ideological role in the project of conquest and imperial expansion. Indeed, Padrón produces compelling evidence in the form of written texts and printed images to suggest that early modern mapping practice owed far more than is usually supposed to earlier, medieval ways of representing the world. Well into the early modern age there survived an array of mapping practices whose fundamental notion of space was linear. Distance, the line, and the itinerary, rather than an encompassing sense of space, were the points of orientation for the vast majority of mapmakers throughout the early modern age. Indeed, the makers of maps could not truly aspire to an accurate and abstract representation of the surface of the earth until the problem of longitude was solved, and that did not occur until the development of timepieces adequate to the required measurements in the eighteenth century. Until that time, mapping practice was not only linear but was also subject to an arbitrariness that was driven by interests and ideologies somewhat alien to those that came into play with the rise of scientific views about world representation. Witness the ad hoc arguments and the contradictions leading up to and following the Treaty of Tordesillas, which separated Spanish and Portuguese claims over in the newly discovered parts of the globe by an imaginary vertical line running near the Cape Verde Islands in the Atlantic.

Far more than can be indicated in the space of a brief review, Padrón has a very deep understanding both of the technical and scientific...