Continental thinking is an inherently European affair, and a relatively recent one at that. The idea of a continent—called apeiron (infinite ground) in Greek—first emerged in ancient Greece, albeit in a different context: namely, in opposition to the small (well-defined) islands of the Aegean Sea. This geographic distinction between infinite and well-defined space evolved in tandem with the two bedrock operations of logic in (pre-Socratic) philosophy: to think infinity and to define concepts. In fact, as Strabo would later put it, geography is a matter for the philosopher. Later on, the ancients started to distinguish (politically, ethically, culturally) among larger landmasses and called Asia, Africa, and Europe the tripartite oikoumene (inhabited earth). But if Greek and Roman writers such as Moschus and Ovid invented proto-continental myths with allegorical protagonists such as the abducted Phoenician princess Europa, they did not necessarily establish a hierarchy among the three parts of the world. As Kären Wigen and Martin Lewis point out in The Myth of Continents (1997), Aristotle's Politics actually praises Greece's in-betweenness—between Europe and Asia—as an advantage over other nations: belonging to more than just one part of the world made the Greeks resilient, astute, and smart. Throughout the Middle Ages, this mostly nonhierarchical vision of the oikoumene was upheld predominantly by a Christian framework keen to promote universal community under the umbrella of Christendom and the idea of a world populated and united by the three sons of Noah: Sem, Cham, and Japheth. It was only on the brink of modernity that an increasing split and hierarchy among the continents developed.

Bodies and Maps: Early Modern Personifications of the Continents, a volume carefully edited by Maryanne Cline Horowitz and Louise Arizzoli, taps precisely into this transition period. In his contribution to the volume, Michael Wintle succinctly encapsulates the increasing qualification of the different parts of the world and its inhabitants: “From a fairly innocuous early medieval conceit [of race], emphasizing the unity of God's creation and taking a particular delight in the symmetry of three continents and three sons of Noah, we progress through a human and continental hierarchy to the justification of slavery in the Enlightenment and thereafter” (48).

Bodies and Maps is organized into five parts (four are conceptual, the last one temporal), ranging from the personification of continents through the specific lens of race and gender (although this prism is never abandoned) to the specific question—which might appear a little arbitrary given the otherwise very broadly conceived parts—of personifications of the world in Italian frescoes to, last but not least, the popularization of continent personifications in the eighteenth century. Crucial for the hierarchization of continents, as the thirteen contributors show, was the so-called discovery of new parts of the world simultaneously with the rise of cartography as a new humanistic discipline in Europe. Together with cartography came the practice to allegorize and personify continents. Taking his point of departure in studies such as Benjamin Braude's immensely insightful yet often overlooked article, “The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods” (William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 [1997]: 103–42), Chet Van Duzer traces in his essay the transition from the medieval conception of a well-defined oikoumene in which Noah's three sons function “as human representatives (not personifications) of the continents” to “the diffusion of female personifications,” when “the three sons of Noah . . . no longer suffice[d] as representatives of the continents” (101). Numerous sixteenth-century Venetian maps fusing America and Asia into one Amerasian landmass speak to this surprisingly convoluted and nonlinear process of (personified) continent making, as Elizabeth Horodowich demonstrates in her contribution.

Horowitz emphasizes in her introduction, with an eye to Francisco Bethencourt's Racism: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century (2013), that sixteenth-century racialized (and racist) allegorizations of continents on maps not only preceded Linnaeus's four-race theory by two centuries, but might have indeed served as its “historical foundation” (3). The study of maps through the lens of race and gender, which this volume undertakes from a predominantly art historical and, to a lesser extent, historical perspective, yields surprising results. Paul Kaplan's astute reading of Battista Agnese's dark-skinned wind-heads on a 1544 world map, for instance, unmasks what look like decorative elements on a map as racialized representations of natural phenomena such as wind (132). Bronwen Wilson takes up the question of the ornament as a crucial marker of race and gender in her afterword, where she also returns to one of the volume's central protagonists: Abraham Ortelius, whose (emblematic, but meanwhile probably overused) title-page engraving of his 1570 Theatrum Orbis Terrarum featuring allegories of the four continents (Europe, Asia, Africa, and America) has become iconic for the study of a racialized and female gendered conceptualization of the different parts of the world.

Bodies and Maps is a most welcome and very timely contribution to the urgent question of how to unearth and critically examine the racism and sexism behind allegorical representations and (typically female gendered) personifications of continents on early modern maps and in visual art more broadly, including tapestries and costume books. It will be of interest, among others, to art historians, historians, historians of ideas, and, perhaps to a lesser extent, literary scholars (Ann Rosalind Jones's essay on costume books is the only contribution by a literary scholar). If theory (that is, philosophy) is inextricably linked to geography, as Strabo knew, then this volume is a crucial step in peeling off Eurocentric interpretive layers in the study of early modern maps and visual art forms. A next step would (and should) be the creation of new theoretical frameworks that open up the notion of interdisciplinarity to novel collaborations among scholars trained in Western and non-Western (academic) traditions and specializing in European and non-European perspectives in the study of the representation of bodies and maps.