English 193                               Handout 9 b

http://www.folger.edu/html/exhibitions/mapping_early_modern/

Mapping Early Modern Worlds

When the poet John Donne called his mistress, "O my America! my new-found-land," he was employing a metaphor easily recognizable by English readers in the early seventeenth century. America itself had been "discovered" more than a century earlier and was often personified as "female" to a European audience. Many other far-flung parts of the world were appearing on ever-more-accurate maps and sea charts, and those maps themselves were now available as handy pocket atlases. But how did Western Europe reach this stage of conversant familiarity with mapping, both as a science and a metaphor? That question is at the heart of this exhibition, which draws on riches from the Folger collections to trace developments in cartography and to illustrate how the idea of "mapping" was used to make sense of explorations into other outer and inner worlds.

Much more than a century of travels and scientific observation made the whole concept of mapping so commonplace that Donne’s readers knew exactly what he meant when he also wrote to his mistress:

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears. . .
Where can we find two better hemispheres
Without sharp North, without declining West?

Orbis Terrarum: The Circle of the Earth  Maps, like works of art and literature, are a means of communication. In fact, when we look at a map we say that we are "reading" it. While we usually think of maps as records of geographical data, they may also record and communicate ideas and even legend and scripture. Medieval world maps of the three continents or the climatic zones were based on Biblical narrative and literary sources rather than on observation and experience. God’s created world was usually represented as a circle within which the three continents outlined a T, a shape reminiscent of the cross. This T-in-O emblem of divine authority was incorporated into the orb, carried by temporal monarchs as a symbol of their power. In the fifteenth century, the rediscovered Geography of the Greek mathematician Ptolemy was first translated into Latin and had a powerful impact on Renaissance cartographers. Gradually, and with increasing accuracy, maps came to represent geographic reality.

Mapping the "Other" Explorers who enlarged the boundaries of their world through travel brought curious objects and eyewitness accounts back to Europe. The new objects were collected by the wealthy in their cabinets of curiosities, but the new information was disseminated more widely by atlas and map makers such as Ortelius, and by those who published compilations of travel narratives, such as Ramusio, Hakluyt, and Purchas. Gradually, pictures of strange but real animals, plants, and people replaced the mythical beasts and monsters of earlier accounts and maps. Samuel Purchas tells the prospective reader of his book: "Here therefore the various Nations, Persons, Shapes, Colours, Habits, Rites, Religions, Complexions, Conditions, Politike and Oeconomike Customes, Languages, Letters, Arts, Merchandises, Wares, and other remarkeable Varieties of Men and Humane Affaries are by Eye-Witnesses related more amply and certainly then any Collector ever hath done. . . ." The contemporary French philosopher Descartes saw the use of all this: "It is good to know something of the customs of various peoples, in order to judge our own more objectively."

 

 

Imaginary Places                                                                                                                   . . . as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.                                                                                               Thus Shakespeare has Theseus describe the act of poetic creation in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The degree to which mapping became a habit of thought in early modern Europe is evident in the various attempts to render imaginary places cartographically; literally, to give "to airy nothing/A local habitation and a name." These places range from the moral geography of Good and Evil represented in an early English morality play and a Dutch emblem book, to the ideal communist state of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, and the amorous/political landscape of a seventeenth-century romance. The implements of cartography—compasses, maps, globes—were also used by poets to enrich their imagery. John Donne imagines his lover’s face reflected in his tears as he leaves her:

On a round ball
A workman that hath copies by, can lay
An Europe, Afrique, and an Asia,
And quickly make that, which was nothing, All,
So doth each teare,
Which thee doth weare,
A globe, yea world by that impression grow.

Mapping the Body  Human dissection probably began as early as 300 B.C., but only with the publication of Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica in 1543 were images of the  body disseminated that could be considered scientifically "modern." Typical of earlier images is the woodcut of a male figure included by the Carthusian prior Gregor Reisch in his little encyclopedic compendium, Margarita Philosophica, first published in 1486. Here the division of the flat figure into sections is reminiscent of early zonal maps. The later sophisticated engravings from Vesalius’s book were copied widely by other anatomists as they named the parts of the body: "Eustachius mapped the ear, Fallopius the female reproductive organs . . . Michael Servetus the pulmonary transit of the blood." The historian Jonathan Sawday has recently observed that like the explorers, "these early discoverers dotted their names, like place-names on a map, over the terrain which they encountered. In their voyages, they expressed the intersection of the body and the world at every point, claiming for the body an affinity with the complex design of the universe. . . . And in the production of a new map of the body, a new figure was also to be glimpsed: the scientist as heroic voyager and intrepid discoverer."

"أنشودة المطر"  بدر شاكر السياب

( عيناك غابتا نخيل ساعة السحر
أو شرفتان راح ينأى عنهما القمر
عيناك حين تبسمان تورق الكروم
وترقص الأضواء كالأقمار في النهر
يرجه المجداف وهنا ساعة السحر ..
كأنما تنبض في غوريهما النجوم
وتغرقان في ضباب من أسىً شفيف
كالبحر سرح اليدين فوقه المساء
دفء الشتاء فيه وإرتعاشة الخريف
والموت والميلاد والظلام والضياء )

http://www.ahewar.org/debat/show.art.asp?aid=46421