The Shaping of Africa: Cosmographic Discourse and Cartographic Science in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (review)

Reviews 231 Parergon 21.2 (2004) more important political influences upon Frederick than Pursell allows. While adopting a rightly holistic view of Frederick’s political-religious ideas, it is possible that Pursell has overstated the predominance of the legal-constitutional aspect in seeking to acquit him of the charge of religious zealotry. While this book is conceived as political history and while Frederick was no natural soldier, he was a ready user of force, not without military knowledge nor victory in battle, whose life was shaped by war. More assessment of him as a commander might have been appropriate. Finally, Pursell is far from uncritical of Frederick and sees his conscience-driven outlook as obsessive. But his portrait of the elector is legitimately sympathetic and depicts him as a man of real human and spiritual depth. Nor does Frederick bear sole responsibility as a perpetrator of the War. But the moral balance may ultimately be more subtle. Frederick was an ideologue, one of those stubborn, otherworldly persons who insist that the world relate to them on their terms.As with many pious persons, his morality was relative: Spanish intervention in the Empire was wrong but English help legitimate. The peace of Europe was the price he placed on the satisfaction of his conscience. He violated the cardinal rule of politics in opting for the maximum so as to lose everything, and the cardinal rule of strategy in starting a war without knowing how to end it. It is one of the merits of this outstanding book that it manages to elicit understanding of a figure who was an historic disaster for Europe. This informative, absorbing, and stimulating study deals with some of the most complex themes of modern history in excellent fashion. It will be widely appreciated by scholars of German, British and European history. John Reeve School of Humanities University of New South Wales, Australian Defence Force Academy Relaño, Francesc, The Shaping of Africa: Cosmographic Discourse and Cartographic Science in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2002; pp. x, 271; 28 b/w plates; RRP US$89.95; ISBN 0754602397. This is a title full of ambiguous words that the author would do well to analyse or at least explicate in his introduction, but as with much of the work itself most of the concepts are touched on only tangentially and the question of what constituted science is largely ignored. Some of the problems probably arise from the 232 Reviews Parergon 21.2 (2004) composition of a text in a language that is clearly not his mother tongue and whose idiosyncratic and concrete forms elude him. The abstract formation of ideas would fit better in a latinate language like French, Spanish or Portuguese. Relaño has a wide background and is well-versed in the historiography of his subject but he would be clearer if he gave some brief historiographical background to his dating and commentary on well-known maps and traditions. Instead, he qualifies his comments in a way that obscures his intention. The text would be much improved by a firm editor who could re-order some of the more unintelligible sentences. This is not deconstruction of the map, and it pays only passing attention to the multiple functions maps have: anthropological, moral, historical or zoological. It is fairly closely restricted to a consideration of the European cosmological mapping tradition from the T-O maps onwards, and it implicitly accepts the inferiority of the early maps to those produced after Portuguese and later exploration, even though what concerns Relaño is the overall representation of Africa, not maps designed for the practical purpose of travel. The case Relaño makes is that Africa, as we perceive the continent, was only defined in European thought after the mainly coastal explorations by the Portuguese in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries ‘corrected’the outlines and started to open up the inland. The Africa of classical and medieval times, Mediterranean Africa, one might say, is a discarded model based on the theological belief that the inhabited earth had to be continuous for the Christian mission to be carried to the ends of the earth. In...