Ptolemy's Geography in the Renaissance ed. by Zur Shalev and Charles Burnett (review)

This new collection presents in print for the first time several papers delivered at a colloquium held at the Warburg Institute in the summer of 2003, and in so doing brings together for a larger audience several erudite and interesting perspectives on a key text of geographical learning in the European Renaissance, Claudius Ptolemy's Geography. Zur Shalev, in his editorial introduction, rightly outlines the significance of Ptolemy's textbook for Renaissance geographers in particular, and also (implicitly) for scholars of Renaissance geographers. Noting that the Geography "has been the subject of immense scholarship" and that "[a] partial bibliography compiled already half a century ago listed thousands of entries" (p. 1), Shalev foreshadows the volume's period of analysis by identifying the main themes in the study of Ptolemy's text in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. From its first (if flawed) translation from Greek into Latin by the scholar Jacopo Angeli in 1406-1409, writes Shalev, the Geography's "text and ideas . . . left their mark on diverse areas of Renaissance culture, on approaches to space and its representation, on modes of visual communication, on experimentation and observation, on humanistic philological-historical practices, and on religious and philosophical thought" (p. 1).

Ptolemy's Geography in the Renaissance sets out to explore some of these areas. Provocatively, the collection begins with a disputation of the extent of Ptolemy's influence on what Shalev describes as "approaches to space and its representation" (p. 1) - Alexander Jones, in his essay "Ptolemy's Geography: A Reform That Failed" argues that the Ptolemaic mode of cartographic projection, long perceived as a revolutionary shift in the history of mapping, was "on the whole a failure" (p. 24). Jones's critical mode - not simply analysing recuperations of Ptolemy's text per se, but also looking at how Ptolemy was read, and his theories interpreted, by Renaissance geographers - is one of the main recurring themes of the collection. While Angelo Cattaneo examines how Ptolemy's theories influenced early modern notions of perspective, Benjamin Weiss, through a detailed survey of editions of the Geography printed between 1475 and 1530, explores the more practical bibliographic elements of publishing, book size, and marginal annotation. In doing so, Weiss draws a clearly defined picture of a text that was used in many different and often divergent ways by its readers.

Alfred Hiatt's contribution, meanwhile, relates a specific edition of Ptolemy's text to developing discourses of nationalism and national identity in Germany and Lower Saxony in the early sixteenth century. In his chapter, Hiatt shows how the "ideological background to the production" (p. 143) of the 1513 Strasbourg edition of Ptolemy was characteristic of emerging German humanism. "I do not mean to characterize the 1513 Ptolemy as a parochial exercise," observes Hiatt. However, "the production of texts such as the 1513 Ptolemy was not the result of a bland and apolitical humanist erudition, but emerged from a rather specific intellectual agenda, one concerned with the restoration of ancient authority and knowledge as the basis for modern political and spatial organization" (p. 160). Once more we are reminded of the important point that cartography is not a wholly neutral, apolitical endeavour, particularly when it is refracted through the lens of translation.

A highlight of the book is Alessandro Scafi's discussion of how Ptolemy's re-emergence affected the religious aspect of early modern cartography. Like many prominent ancient texts recovered in early modern Europe, Ptolemy's geographical canon was often interpreted with a specific view to prevailing religious debates. A particularly thorny issue for cartographers of the period was the precise geographic position of certain biblical sites not easily located, in particular the Garden of Eden...