Mapping Early Modern Worlds

Mapping Early Modern Worlds, part of the Exhibitions at the Folger, opened on February 14, 1998 and closed on July 1, 1998.

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?

Exhibition material

Orbis Terrrarum: 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.

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.

The geographical writings of Ptolemy summed up nearly six centuries of Greek speculation on the shape of the earth and the extent of its habitation. Ptolemy stated that the earth was spherical and demonstrated that places upon it could be located within a geographical coordinate system. Most importantly, Ptolemy recognized the problems of depicting a spherical earth on a flat surface and developed three solutions, or projections, for doing so. Within a century of Ptolemy’s death, his work was virtually forgotten. It was not until the fourteenth century that manuscripts of his Geography preserved in Constantinople became known in Europe. Renaissance cartographers eagerly adopted Ptolemy’s concept of ordering space, of representing a subject within a measured geometrical framework.

Ironically, Ptolemy’s work became known in Europe just at the time that explorers would demonstrate its limitations. Early in the sixteenth century, editions of Ptolemy began to incorporate maps reflecting new discoveries. The original maps were retained in "their ancient form," but for the first time a distinction was made between ancient and modern geography. New maps began to give Renaissance readers a sense of the size of the world and provided pictures of lands previously unknown.

This case included

• Hartmann Schedel. Liber Cronicarum cum figuris. Nuremberg, 1493. INC S281.
• Claudius Ptolemaeus. Geographie opus novissima. Strasbourg, 1513. G 87 P8 L3 1513 Cage.

Geography-Chorography-Cartography: Mapping Terminology

The first sentence of Ptolemy’s Geography defines geography as "a picture of the whole part of the known world." By the time western Europeans could read a translation of Ptolemy, the "known world" was a lot larger than Ptolemy had ever imagined it could be, and it seemed to be expanding every year. Ptolemy’s distinction between Geography and Chorography made so much sense that it was adapted by Renaissance writers. To explain the difference, Ptolemy used an analogy with drawing: "geography is concerned with the depiction of the entire head, chorography with individual features such as an eye or an ear." That is, geography is concerned with the mapping of countries, chorography with the mapping and description of counties, cities, and other smaller divisions. Cartography refers to the actual science of drawing maps—carts or charts—from the Greek word meaning "leaf of paper."

This case included

• Peter Apian. Cosmographia. Antwerp, 1550.

Theatrum Orbis Terrarum: Theatre of the Whole World

Abraham Ortelius, cartographer, map collector, and businessman, is considered "the father of the atlas." His great work, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, was published in Antwerp in 1570 and went through many editions in a variety of languages. Conceiving of geography as "the eye of History," necessary for a true understanding of history, Ortelius presented his maps as a "theater of the world," in a format which he hoped would be convenient to those who did not have the room to hang on their walls "those great and large Geographicall maps or Chartes, which are folded or rowl’d up." His project thus both expanded and contracted the world, uncovering new insights into the known and hitherto unknown portions of the globe, while condensing it into the space of a book that could fit on a table and make, as Donne wrote, "one little room an everywhere."

This case included

• Abraham Ortelius. Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. Antwerp, 1595. Folio G1015 O6 1595 Cage.

Gerard Mercator's Atlas

Although Ortelius was the first to publish a modern atlas, Gerard Mercator was the first to use the word "atlas" to refer to a collection of maps in a volume. The title of Mercator’s Atlas was not based on the name of the Titan forced to support the heavens on his head, but rather was the name of a legendary king of Libya, a philosopher and astronomer who is supposed to have constructed the first globe. Mercator’s world map of 1569, drawn on the projection that bears his name, was one of his most significant achievements, but equally significant was his Atlas, to which he devoted the final twenty-five years of his life and which he had not completed when he died. Two parts appeared in 1585 and 1589, but the final part was seen through the press after Mercator’s death by his son Rumold in 1595.

This case included

• Gerardus Mercator. Atlas sive cosmographicae meditationes de fabrica mvndi et fabricati figvra. Amsterdam, 1630.

Mapping a Nation

The project to map a nation completely was first fully realized in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. While the impetus came originally from the crown—Queen Elizabeth backed Christopher Saxton’s great atlas of 1579—the project soon took on a life of its own in which the land and its parts, rather than the monarch, took center stage. The men who produced the county maps, Camden, Speed, Norden, Drayton, and others, often worked at their own expense, hoping for some remuneration from a patron. The monarch’s gradual displacement in favor of the land is symbolized by the progression of images on title pages, from Elizabeth enthroned in Saxton’s atlas to the allegorical figure of Britain in Drayton’s Polyolbion. The royal coat-of-arms is increasingly placed on the margins of maps that foreground the chorography of the land itself with its hills, forests, cities, towns, monuments, battles, flora, fauna, and inhabitants, giving rise to the Nation as an entity independent of the Monarch.

This case included

• Christopher Saxton. Atlas of the counties of England and Wales. London, 1590?. Flat STC 21805.5; displayed title page.
• Michael Drayton. Poly-Oblion. London, 1612. STC 7226.