Download Download

Number 63, Spring 2009 cartographic perspectives 69 its chapters, the text is to be highly recommended as generations, it was gradually supplemented by new encouraging further work in this realm. Because of this knowledge, which led to the need to distinguish book, and other publications by Knowles, Hillier, Bol, ancient from modern knowledge. For Hiatt, there is Gregory, and others, I look forward to future publica- a clear and consistent, if not always smooth, line of tions in the use of GIS for History. thought extending from the ancient period through the early modern. It is characterized by ancient writings being retold and supplemented, not simply to preserve the originals, but to give them prolonged credibility by Terra Incognita: Mapping the Antipodes before 1600 making them appear to foretell subsequent discover- By Alfred Hiatt ies. University of Chicago Press, 2008 The third theme explores periodization, and Hiatt’s 298 pages, 8 color plates, 47 grayscale figures conviction that conceptions of the world do not easily Hardbound (ISBN 13: 978-0-226-33303-8) fit standard period delimiters. He observes that, while change did occur, “[W]hy that change occurred will Reviewed by: Jonathan F. Lewis not be enlightening if it falls back on banalities about Benedictine University inherently “antique,” “medieval,” or “modern” ways of viewing the world” ( 9). For Hiatt, the medieval pe- Terra Incognita examines and explains the initial ap- riod witnessed not the end of a view of the world in- pearance and subsequent evolution of European per- formed by ancient writers, but rather a dialogue with spectives on remote, unvisited portions of the globe. older texts carried out by medieval translators chal- Covering the period from antiquity through the medi- lenged to explain (or explain away) positions taken eval epoch and into the period of global exploration, by esteemed writers such as Virgil. Later, as European the book’s eight chapters are arranged in chronological explorers encountered new regions, their attempts to succession. While the chapters are of roughly equal map it were heavily informed by the very traditions length, the periods each covers necessarily are not. that had deemed these areas forever inaccessible. Hiatt’s initial chapter lays out his framework for The book’s final theme is one of representation. presenting European representations of unknown Many of the chapters examine the necessarily specu- lands, which he introduces by describing Abraham lative graphic representations of unvisited and/or Ortelius’ sixteenth century Typus orbis terrarum. This unreachable terra incognita lands that were devised by map’s inscription on the massive continent thought at European cartographers and explorers over a period the time to dominate the southern hemisphere reads, spanning hundreds of years. “Terra Australis Nondum Cognita,” or “Southern Land The convergence of the four themes is exempli- Not Yet Known,” a clear indication of the expecta- fied by the medieval reinvention of Cicero’s ideas via tion that remote lands did in fact exist, even if their Macrobius and his subsequent translators and critics, exact form and contents were unknown. As Europeans thus allowing an ancient perspective to make its way acquired new knowledge about remote regions, terra into much later and, presumably, more knowledgeable incognita gradually became terra inventa (discovered periods. land) and terra nondum cognita (land not yet known). The map of Macrobius illustrates Cicero’s theories; That is to say, it evolved from unknowable into places it was produced for a text written in the fifth century; both knowable and places soon to be known. there is reason to think that it was wholly or partially Throughout his book, Hiatt consistently returns reconstructed in the tenth. It underwent significant to four organizational themes. The first theme in- adaptations in the twelfth century, and a revival of in- volves the political implications “of spaces and people terest in the fifteenth as a result of humanist interest in beyond the known world” (8). These implications Cicero. Is the map classical, late antique, medieval, or include both imperial ambitions and tests of faith, the Renaissance? Does it not rather belong to any period former because the antipodes represented frustrating in which it was reproduced? (11) limitations on ambitious rulers, and the latter stem- Given Hiatt’s objectives, the early chapter “The ming from Biblical assertions that Christianity must be Antipodes in Antiquity” represents an important spread to all lands. This theological implication led St. foundation for what follows. In it, he examines texts Augustine to conclude that no territory (and certainly produced during the period and the political and no people) existed beyond the insurmountable barriers social significance of distant, unreachable lands. He of vast oceans and intense desert heat. introduces the antipodes by reviewing texts of clas- Hiatt’s second theme covers the manner in which sical writers convinced not only of Earth’s sphericity remote areas were described and depicted, producing but also its likelihood of being widely inhabited. Plato, a particular geographic or cartographic tradition. As in particular, is cited as having set many terms for knowledge of the world was handed down through subsequent discussion, including a test of basic intel- 70 cartographic perspectives Number 63, Spring 2009 ligence and reasoning based on explaining why people introduce devastating challenges to old systems of living on the opposite side of the planet would not see knowledge. After all, Augustine had said only that themselves as upside down. Later, Crates of Mallos of- God would not have put people in regions that were fered what came to be a popular depiction of Earth di- inaccessible. Clearly, his error lay only in believing vided into four regions, whose remote residents were that insurmountable barriers existed, an observation identified by Geminus asperiokoi (inhabitants of the accepted by the ancients, not in the position he had northern portion of the western hemisphere), antoikoi derived from scripture. Now that it was known that (those living in the southern portion of the eastern humans in fact dwelt in previously unknown areas, hemisphere, i.e. Africa), and antipodes (people dwell- the work of evangelization should continue because ing in the southern portion of the western hemisphere “the head of the Church was charged with the apos- and whose feet were, thus, opposite our own, inspir- tolic duty of promoting the spread of the gospel to all ing the region’s name). The central reference point for peoples” (159). Unknown land was thereafter increas- these regions, of course, was oikoumene or ecumene, ingly defined as land where the name of the savior the known world of the Mediterranean, Europe, and was unknown and, thus, where the duty of Christian western Asia. Once accepted, these regions represent- explorers was to redeem the residents by bringing ed opportunities for political commentary and were them into the flock of the faithful. particularly useful for characterizing the foolishness of Hiatt examines various European explorers’ en- ambitious emperors intent on world conquest, given counters with the Americas in order to show the coex- the impossibility of reaching, much less subduing, istence of old ways of thinking alongside new. Colum- remote outlying areas. bus, for example, is mentioned for having continued to From there, Hiatt proceeds to describe three major believe he had reached Asia, displaying the resilience writers whose works preserved classical formulations of the perspective that all land formed one vast conti- of remote and unknown regions of the world: Augus- nent. This is in contrast to Vespucci’s conclusion that tine of Hippo, Macrobius, and Capella. Describing the the new continents were not at all connected with the views of each in detail, Hiatt characterizes them as Old World. Hiatt shows how the insular perspective either receiving and rejecting the ideas of the classi- was again given a new lease on life with the discovery cal period (Augustine) or receiving and embellishing of Antarctica merging with early reports of Australia them in ways that affected later understanding of to produce maps depicting a vast southern continent, the classics (Macrobius). Hiatt then moves to graphic Terra Australis. depictions of unknown regions, particularly as these The enormous southern continent was quickly rec- were informed by the writings of classical authors and ognized as an opportunity to exonerate old systems of their translators. This section introduces zonal maps knowledge. Not only did it connect major land masses into the discussion in order to analyze how areas lying into one territory, as the insular perspective required, in and to the south of the unbearably hot zone, within it also offset the weight of northern land masses, and to the north of the excruciatingly cold zone, and to something the ancients had insisted was required for the west of a vast and unnavigable ocean were char- Earth’s rotation to remain stable. Thus posited, early acterized. Informed by longstanding legends and by observations were seen as corroborations that only tales from travelers who claimed to have visited some slowly came to be reevaluated with the introduction of of these areas, cartographers occasionally populated new information. Even then, however, terra incognita such regions with monstrous races. What prevailed continued to exist, only displaced toward the interior from the ancient into the medieval periods, then, was of lands whose coastlines had been mapped. uncertainty about places beyond the ecumene. The an- Hiatt devotes considerable space to the evolving tipodes had to be explained or explained away in a de- cartographic treatment of Terra Australis, whose falsely bate that was largely theoretical. Before long, however, depicted vast dimensions remained in place well into “[P]eople began to challenge the impermeability of the the seventeenth century. Such large, unknown areas barriers between known and unknown worlds”(89).

Load more