How did Europe emerge through pictorial maps, and what did early Renaissance maps and cartopoetics have to do with that emergence? Cartographic Humanism is an intertextual study of the history of cartography that looks at transnational spaces of fantasy and exploration, knowledge and emotion, and symbolic places and claimed discovery. It takes on Europe in terms of rhetorical lexicons and poetic toolboxes, conceptually and textually, beyond the famous Mercator projection of 1569. Variably open and enclosed, Europe was an island, a territorial continent (amid myths of continents), on a grid, as a fortress, a playground, and a passage for multilingual borderlanders who leave home and reinvent their topoi.
Taking further leave of Ptolemy and the anxieties that produced colonial Europe after the circa 1500 “spatial turn,” Piechocki is not content with Atlantic centerings or post–Cold War geopolitics, or the modern categories of nationality and EU-Enlightenment civilization, or confessional lines of exclusion drawn by nation-states (though lines for the closed space of Europa-as-Christendom in early modern to modern bulwark form are present in some maps). The author explains emergent European cartography “as a pharmakon, present and poison alike … where colonialism, slavery, and exploitation are but a few of its dire outcomes” (232). Clearly this is a Central European component (as liminal!) of the book, from overseas colonial lands into the eastern ramparts of the Kingdom of Poland and Muscovy, Greek to Italian city-states northward to German and Scandinavian lands, and well into the dynastic Habsburg and Ottoman empires.
Piechocki's five featured characters and maps are Conrad Celtis (1502), Maciej Miechowita (1517), Geoffroy Tory (1529), Girolamo Fracastoro (1530), and Luís Vaz de Camões (1572). Emergent Europe was a sixteenth-century translatio, a copy of copies and an open question. This is the lit-crit and crit-carto spirit of the book. Maps are zonal projections, unstable and unreliable traveling texts. Maps of post-Ptolemaic lands circa 1480–1580 become a rich source for historians, philologists, and Italianate humanists, irreducible to Mercator or the transatlantic worlds. Hence her attention to shifts out of north-south global axes (pace Larry Wolff) and landlocked oceans. She begins her genealogy with delimitations of central (Germanic), eastern (Polish or Sarmatian), and western (French) Europe against indeterminate or nonexistent Asian, Mediterranean, or African borders. The chapter on Miechowita reveals her knowledge of Latin (and at least nine other languages) and cartography out of the history of the Kingdom of Poland, all in original translations. Last chapters feature the Italian Fracastoro on diseases and fictive cures, and a focus by Camões on Indo-Mediterranean landscapes superimposed over classical ones. Piechocki innovatively tracks the codes and discourses of Euro-poetic texts, subtexts, and peri-texts (following Gérard Genette and Denis Wood) of each map. Each chapter offers a fascinating philological commentary.
Every map has a silence, a frame, and a place for others outside the West (or Wests). Piechocki builds on Renaissance polymaths and humanists as studied spatially by Walter Mignolo (the darker side of the Renaissance), David Woodward (ed., Cartography in the European Renaissance, vol. 3 [Chicago, 2007]), Tom Conley (The Self-Made Map [Minneapolis, 1996]), and Ricardo Padrón (The Spacious Word [Chicago, 2004]). The author invites us to consider critical themes—grids and navels: how Europe experienced “umbilicization” (a fine word) by plotters of an imaginary center, past, and present. Borders had attendant epistemic anxieties and archives. There were islands that ruled continents, from Greek city-states to empires. Fictive lines were drawn to cut off cities, towns, countries, the diseased (so imagined), and sometimes entire confessional groups. This was Renaissance into early modern European history, a cartography of fantasy and exclusion. There is finally the cursed Ptolemaic legacy, a disciplinary binary of flattened-earth part/whole and chorography/cosmography.
Europe, the unexplored continent. Really? Yes, says Piechocki. Cartography is liminal, interstitial, and visual. It was philosophical from the start, a humanistic discipline for intense philological study. Nation-states are clearly not as preferable to the author as multiconfessional empires or multilingual spaces. One might call this a certain golden-era fetishism of the early modern, bracketing diversity, but she is careful not to fall into nationalist traps. Her argument underscores spatial turns, in the plural. European novelties such as monsters, empty spaces, islands, and regions that didn't exist—like Sarmatia or Pannonia (no Kakania yet)—very much existed in Euro-cartographic worlds. The Ptolemaic binary between part and whole, chorography and cosmography fell into distortive continents and their myths. Readers who are familiar with critical geography/cartography will appreciate Piechocki's analysis of tropes and dismantlings of Eurocentric mapping conventions (the six-volume University of Chicago series in the History of Cartography is essential here). As I reread this neo-Sarmatian postmodernist book, I thought of the spirit of the iconoclastic Polish-Argentine writer and playwright Witold Gombrowicz; his decenterings of canon, voice, scale, and symbolization; and the lines of Trans-Atlantyk that are not lines to divide, but of exile and the masked performative, of translated communication.
Anyone interested in map misreading(s) and skeptical of progress from the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries will delight in Piechocki's erudition. The images and translations from texts gathered in the original are worth the price. As a historian reading a book for comp-lit specialists, I might have wished for less Copernican novelty and more Central European political context. The five chapters stand alone, but I think this is the book's experimental style. In five case studies, a ten-language foray into the ontology of maps and epistemic anxieties reproduced the era from Renaissance humanism stretching from Italy to Scandinavia and Portugal into Poland and Muscovy, we see European political tensions and poetic futures that go unresolved. Latinate Europe was a cartopoetic experiment. Perhaps it is in this Euro-indeterminacy that we find the only suitable definition for the posthuman, decolonial metropoles-cum-peripheries that remain. In this effervescent book of literary criticism and the map, there is much creative ground to be gained.
