Transcending Their Format: Dictionaries, Encyclopedias and Atlases

transcending their format: Dictionaries, Encyclopedias and Atlases » PAM PETERS Dictionaries, encyclopedias and atlases images. In the twenty-first century geographical are age-old vehicles for itemised knowledge information on the internet and associated apps and eminently useful formats for those seeking can be optimised for the ‘user experience’ (UX). a ready reference. At the same time, they are This itself is a new orientation in information not always valued in the academic world, since delivery: that it can be varied online according they can be seen as recensions of the known to the consumer, as much as the overriding rather than fresh inquiry, and limited by their purposes of the provider. But either way, respective formats — each constrained as to the the three formats are always embedded in kind of information it can contain. contemporary culture, reflecting both local and So the dictionary — according to an older international sociocultural trends. view of lexicography — concentrates on the To explore these evolving aspects of common lexicon, and should not include proper information delivery, I look at ancient and names and encyclopedic information since that modern examples of these formats, tracing is not the ‘native’ content of the dictionary. significant stages in the evolution of each, Atlases should be geographical rather than and the ‘non-native’ elements that they political, although the mapping of continents incorporate. This will also show how productive inevitably raises inescapable questions about the three formats are in supplying access to national borders — and the not small matter of specialised information, integrating knowledge the language of the placenames. Encyclopedias from different sources, and supporting notionally contain ‘neutral’, culturally unbiased interdisciplinary inquiry and reflection. knowledge on the subjects they treat. Yet all three formats may be ethnocentric to some ATLASES AND THE APPLICATIONS extent, and likely to project something of the OF CARTOGRAPHY identity and interests of their makers. Looking at examples of all three, one finds Cartography, the atlas and mapping offer that their content has not always been ‘pure’ in the most striking examples of transcending past applications — nor will it be as the twenty- their format, and thereby illuminate the other first century unfolds. They must continue to two types of reference material. Atlases present evolve in digital media, which offers infinite a variety of realisations because they show the (above) combinations of the written word, speech steady expansion of geographical knowledge and FULL DETAIL OF MONTAGE IMAGES CAN BE FOUND and other types of sound, not to mention improvements in cartography from medieval ON PP. 70, 72, 79. two- and three-dimensional still and moving to modern times. They also reflect enormous 68 Humanities Australia cultural changes from a theocratic to secular- of the world. This was a considerable advance (above) social view of the world. We might add that they in mapping for practical navigation, at least in Fragment of Fra are not necessarily ‘disciplined’ by the stringently the middle sections of the globe between the Mauro map (c. 1450) geographical expectations of twentieth-century arctic and antarctic circles. The eclipsing of PUBLIC DOMAIN VIA exemplars, such as the Times World Atlas. the first eponymous Atlas by the second helps WIKIPEDIA COMMONS, <HTTP://UPLOAD. The word atlas is an eponym from one of to symbolise the scientific revolution by which WIKIMEDIA.ORG/ WIKIPEDIA/AM/6/61/ two possible Graeco-Roman sources. The better cartography was transformed in the modern era. FRA_MAURO_.JPG> known one (noted in the Oxford English Cartographic advances were of course aligned Dictionary) is that it invokes the name of the with European explorations beyond the frontiers titan rebel condemned by Zeus to hold up the of the known world. Atlases facilitated access heavens. Atlas’s burden is well known from the to new resources, mineral as well as animal classical sculpture that has him stooping under and vegetable. But the most visible motive for the weight of the celestial globe — an image exploration in early European maps was the perpetuated at the front of Italian and earlier missionary imperative of the Catholic Church. Dutch atlases of the sixteenth century. Later The evangelical impulse can be seen in Fra statues of Atlas have him bearing the weight of Mauro’s upside down map of the world (c. 1450), the terrestrial globe, confirming his association and in the small fragment from it, shown here. with the modern published atlas. An alternative Fra Mauro depicts an island forming the eponym for the word atlas features on the southern section of Africa, which is labeled frontispiece of Gerardus Mercator’s (1595) ‘Diab’ with the note ‘Questo e el nome de la posthumously published reflections on isola’, ‘This is the name of the island.’ It is no cartography: that it is the name of the legendary coincidence that diab is the Portuguese word for king Atlas of the ancient North African kingdom ‘devil’.1 Fra Mauro’s map of the island is dotted of Mauretania, bordering the straits of Gibraltar. with mosques and other Islamic architecture to King Atlas was a wise philosopher, astronomer indicate the scope for propagation of the faith. and mathematician — and thus an appropriate A note on the lower right hand side: ‘Questa symbol for Mercator’s cylindrical projection region fertillissima esta conquista … circa el Humanities Australia 69 (right) Ortelius map Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. PUBLIC DOMAIN VIA WIKIPEDIA COMMONS, <HTTP://COMMONS. WIKIMEDIA.ORG/WIKI/ FILE:ATLAS_ORTELIUS_ KB_PPN369376781-001AV- 001BR.JPG> 1430’, points out that there is good agricultural Terrarum (1570) was there what we nowadays land here. The map provides both religious call an atlas; that is, a volume containing maps and economic motives for venturing down to all drawn to the same scale. This significant Diab, though to modern eyes the chances of step in the evolution of atlases emanated in reaching your destination with such a map are northern Europe, although the maps themselves rather fanciful. are still labelled in Latin, Europe’s lingua The first commercially published atlases franca for educated Europeans even from (below) available in sixteenth-century Italy were bundles Protestant nations. Fra Ricci’s map of ten to twelve maps from different sources, Ortelius’s cartography reveals a big advance from the Vatican drawn to different scales and bound together. on Fra Mauro’s, with far better mapping of collection (Congregation de They were sometimes called Lafreri atlases, after Africa and the Indian Ocean. But its limitations Propagande Fide) their leading publisher, or by their bibliographic are still to be seen in the western and southern PHOTO: P. PETERS acronym IATO = ‘Italian assembled-to-order’. hemispheres. The unknown continent in the Not until Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis south, ‘incognita’, assumes giant proportions with Australia merged with Antarctica, otherwise being only a pregnant bump south of Java (underwriting an earlier name for Australia as ‘Java la grande’, which was probably derived from Portuguese cartography). Australia and Antarctica are also merged in a very curious map of Terra Australis that is held by the Vatican, prints of which were brought to Brisbane, Queensland, for the World Expo 88 in 1988. The map from the collection of the Congregation de Propaganda Fide is attributed to Fra Ricci, a Dominican missionary who was based in Manila, the Philippines, in the mid- seventeenth century. The map itself is dated 1676, but represents an earlier construction of 70 Humanities Australia the missionary opportunities in the southern Fra Ricci’s elementary mapping contrasts hemisphere, in line with papal dispensations with the fine cartography to be found decades of 1494 (Treaty of Tordesillas) and 1529 (Treaty earlier in explorers’ maps from the Flemish/ of Zaragoza). Those treaties were put in place Dutch school, such as those contained in Petrus to balance the colonial interests of Spain and Plancius’s Atlas (1594). Plancius’s mapping of the Portugal, and to divide between them the world ‘spice islands’ probably owed its detail to that of that was available to be proselytised. earlier Portuguese maps made by explorers and The Vatican map divides Australia into two for traders in the East Indies. the propagation of the faith, along the meridian This fragment shows the myriad islands of the identified in the Treaty of Zaragoza, as if the Melanesian archipelago north of New Guinea, western segment would be for the Portuguese, with Borneo in the top left, and equatorial and the eastern segment for the Spanish. routes through to the Pacific and up to China. It shows Portuguese dominions in the western The motivation for venturing there is visible Atlantic (Brazil), and their passage via southern at the bottom of map, in botanical drawings of Africa into the Indian Ocean, up to Sumatra, nutmeg (nux myristica), cloves (caryophilorum Java, Borneo, from which islands ‘haud difficilis arbor) and sandalwood (santalum fluvium), est aditus ad terram Australem’, ‘it is not difficult the three key commodities of the spice trade. to access the land of Australia’. Meanwhile Their labelling is disproportionate with the map’s Spanish dominion stretches down the west side placenames. Again, all labels and annotations are of South America from Lima (Peru) to Chile and in Latin. across the Pacific to the east

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