The study of interactions and exchanges between the Arabic-Islamic world and the Latin West has a long history. As the introduction to this volume and many of its essays make clear, this kind of study has often suffered from poorly-evidenced assumptions. The essays presented here provide a welcome corrective, each supported by careful studies of transmission history and the literary, scholarly and social environments that led to the production of maps between 1100 and 1500. The result is a volume that provides a detailed unpicking of the various connections between Latin and Arabic-Islamic cartography in the period.
The volume contains six essays, which deal predominantly with Latin receptions of Arabic-Islamic cartography (chapter ii does so a little more tangentially than the rest). A number of the essays, moreover, assert that the texts under study were products of a cultural milieu defined by bilateral exchange. In this they mirror Hyunhee Park’s assertions about the Indian Ocean, where he sees Arabic-Islamic and Chinese cartography as a product of knowledge learned from a shared maritime community.Footnote 1 This is a welcome approach that provides a more nuanced perspective on the development and sharing of cartographic knowledge that helps us move past the simplistic model of Arabic-Islamic decline and Latin-European growth that Hiatt critiques in the introduction.
The volume’s introduction deserves special attention. So often introductions to edited volumes provide a brief (often quite dry) critical summary of the field (asserting the ‘problem’ that the volume intends to solve) followed by an outline of the essays (and how each will address the problem in question). Hiatt’s introduction to this volume goes far beyond this assignment, providing a twenty-four-page summary of ‘Geographical thought in medieval Christian Europe and the Arabic-Islamic world’ (pp. 4–28). This overview, of course, serves to situate the essays that follow and the (sometimes quite complex) evidence that the authors use in support of their arguments. However, it additionally functions as a useful and accessible summary of the field that more than serves Hiatt’s goal ‘to introduce [the field] to a wider audience’ (p. 39). This section of the book would be well-suited as assigned reading for an undergraduate class on this subject.
As Hiatt underlines in the introduction, ‘one alternative to grand narratives of epochal change is to explore instances of transmission in detail’ (p. 33). What follows is a series of essays that deal with specific transmission cases, often focusing on one text. Each case is well explained, if occasionally dense – an occupational hazard in a field that engages with the intricacies of pre-modern scientific thought alongside complex pathways of transmission. Both textual and graphical evidence of transmission is considered across the essays.
The first two essays deal with scientific geography and its implications for cartography. In the first, Hiatt examines De causis proprietatum elementorum, a translation of a ninth-century Arabic work, which he argues has been ‘Europeanised’ during translation. This in part was the result of the difficulties of transmitting knowledge ‘across linguistic barriers’, but it also reflects how the Arabic-Islamic and Latin world inherited a shared Greek science of geography. Arabic-Islamic ideas about the climata were adapted to suit theories already circulating in Europe, but both models were in some way shaped independently by the classical Greek tradition. Hiatt argues that Arabic-Islamic ideas were not received neutrally, but that contact promoted thinkers to ‘reassess the ancient learning’ (p. 72).
In the second essay, Ducène explores the manner in which Ptolemy’s Geography (as opposed to the Almagest) circulated in the Arabic-Islamic world. The only surviving translation of the text into Arabic is late. The knowledge available in the Geography widely circulated in Arabic from the ninth century, but the exact manner of circulation is unclear. Ducène argues that access to Ptolemy was indirect, often through al-Khwarizmī’s Ṣurat al-arḍ. This had major implications for Latin cartography, which also received the data from Ptolemy’s Geography indirectly, through Arabic intermediaries, until a Latin translation of the text was produced much later.
In the third essay, Dekker examines astronomical maps. It is well known that mathematical models of the cosmos (found in the astrolabe) migrated more-or-less directly from the Arabic-Islamic into the Latin sphere for the purposes of computing time. Celestial cartography developed through a more circuitous route. Dekker compares the Schoenberg maps, a pair of celestial maps found in a Hebrew astrological treatise with Arabic-Islamic parallels, focusing particularly on their imagery. She concludes that the maps were likely influenced by Arabic-Islamic celestial globes (as opposed to maps), in which the Jewish community had a particular interest, but that these early Hebrew celestial maps did not directly influence the Latin tradition.
The fourth essay gives a critical assessment of al-Idrīsī’s famous Nuzhat al-Mushtāq. Hiatt argues that the text has been misrepresented as a meeting-point of Latin and Arabic-Islamic cultures. In fact, the text relies almost entirely on Arabic sources in addition to unnamed informants at the court of al-Idrīsī’s patron, Roger ii. The Nuzhat al-Mushtāq’s treatment of particular locations and events, Hiatt claims, suggests that al-Idrīsī was actively promoting Roger and his aspirations in North Africa. The text was, however, addressed to a Muslim audience, presenting to them the ‘failings of Islamic polities’ (p. 135).
The fifth essay introduces the Liber secretorum, a fourteenth-century proposal for a crusade that (uniquely, compared to other such proposals) contains a map. Schröder argues that this map has been wrongly interpreted as a ‘transitional’ map, a bridge between Arabic-Islamic and Latin cartography. Rather, it represents a ‘transcultural’ map, adopting Arabic-Islamic motifs and an Idrīsian cartographic model to produce a map that serves to illustrate the proposal and its global scope.
In the sixth essay, Vagnon examines the cultural and social context that produced the Catalan atlas. The atlas was not the product of direct transmission from one or even a series of sources. Marco Polo’s description of the world evidently had a direct impact on the maps and their captions. However, there are many stories accounted in the atlas that share features with multiple sources but cannot be traced to a single source. This includes overlaps with Arabic works. Vagnon concludes that the overlaps were the result of stories circulating among a Mediterranean maritime milieu (including Christians, Jews and Muslims) consulted by mapmakers working in cartographic workshops in Majorca and Barcelona.
Hiatt and Rapoport conclude by identifying two areas of Arabic-Islamic influence over Latin cartography identified by the essays, but emphasise that Latin influence on Arabic was clearly limited. Although each essay stands well on its own, read together they do indeed illustrate the trends noted in the conclusion. Although the individual essays do not directly speak to these core themes or intentionally build upon one-another, there are some cross-references in the footnotes, which further show the utility of reading the essays together. All essays are generously illustrated with colour images. It should be emphasised that this greatly facilitates reading, as all arguments rely heavily upon features illustrated on the maps themselves.
It remains to say that this volume as a whole left me feeling inspired and interested in the future of this important field. Recent developments in the digital humanities (note that this book was published in 2021 and at the time of writing many advances had already been made) would likely benefit this research. The ability to use computers to compare images at scale (as Dekker does for the celestial maps) or to compare text variants (as Vagnon does for the Catalan atlas) will likely further enrich this kind of study of cartography in the near future. Hiatt stresses in the introduction that the volume represents ‘the necessary first steps in opening out a field’ (p. 36). These essays very much illustrate the exciting prospects offered through a comparative reading of cartography.
