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  • Las ideas geográficas y la imagen del mundo en la literatura española medieval by Aníbal A. Biglieri
  • Michael Harney
Biglieri, Aníbal A. Las ideas geográficas y la imagen del mundo en la literatura española medieval. Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2012. 421 pp.

Among the affiliated humanistic fields most indispensable to the study of medieval literature and culture is the history of geography. This is to say, not historical geography, a discipline that studies the human and physical geography of past eras, but rather the history of geography as a field of knowledge. The transition from mythic or folkloric medieval geography to the modern rationalized scientific discipline occurs as an interaction of several intellectual regimes. These chiefly include the increasingly precise and accurate body of real-world knowledge derived from travel and exploration, and the interaction of geography as an emerging science with other developing disciplines, such as cartography, geology, astronomy, and cosmography. The real demarcation between medieval and modern geographical sensibilities is not marked by the transition from a realm of lesser to one of greater knowledge. Rather, geographical modernization takes the form of a gradual repudiation of ancient and medieval geography’s encyclopedic method and mythographic proclivity in favor of the theoretical orientation of modern geography and its sister disciplines. Where ancient and medieval geography perceives a vast and picturesque earthly tableau, modern scientific geography studies a set of interactive evolutionary processes.

Aníbal Biglieri’s broad-ranging, elegantly written, and impressively documented study explains the state of Peninsular geographical knowledge before this disciplinary transformation. [End Page 202]

As he persuasively argues in his introduction, we are best advised to read the geographical content of medieval works on their own terms, and to see medieval geography not merely as a phase leading toward the modern, “enlightened” science, but rather as a distinct world view no less rational in its own terms than that of the equally imaginative but depersonalized field of later centuries. He shows that medieval Spanish literature, even when occasionally tinkering with bequeathed notions, generally refers to the medieval terrestrial tableau and its myriad of local scenes and denizens. Largely inherited from the ancients, this picturesque geography ensured that even when far-flung earthly corners were discovered, the revelation tended to be seen as a re-discovery, a corrected placement or enhanced comprehension of previously imagined phenomena within an enduring earthly milieu of continents, kingdoms, races, and creatures. Thus, observes Biglieri, even eye-witness travelers like Marco Polo felt compelled to accommodate ancient concepts, like that of the unicorn, in making sense of the world.

Thoroughly documenting the pervasive Spanish reception, within an ecumenical European geographical tradition, of ancient and medieval lore, Biglieri refers to a truly impressive range of texts, genres, and authors in reconstructing the state of geographical awareness in the early and later Spanish Middle Ages. The wide variety of genres weighing in on geographical, climatological, and cosmological issues included not only specialized treatises (e.g., the Semeiança del mundo, the Libro del conoscimiento de todos los reinos), encyclopedias (especially Isidore of Seville and his numerous epigons), and travel books, but also works of history, such as the General Estoria; literary works such as the Libro de Alexandre, various versions of the Troy tale, and the Libro del caballero Zifar: and even law codes like the Siete Partidas. In chapters devoted to the form and division of the Earth, to the oceanic realm, to the Occidental and Northern regions, to the South and the East, we discover the prevalence, even on the popular level, of such notions as the sphericity of the earth and of heavenly bodies; of the Ocean as an unbounded “fluvial entity” surrounding all lands; of the four corners of the Earth and of the five climactic zones; of the genealogical descent of man from Biblical lineages.

Biglieri captures medieval Spanish geographical mentalities not only by his deft characterizaton of Spanish versions of time-honored tropes (e.g., the topical contrast of the Septentrion and the Meridianum), but by his attention to the highly specific Peninsular reception of such influential works as Mandeville’s [End Page 203] Travels. The latter...

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