Excavations at the base of the Palatine Hill in Rome in late 2006 uncovered a number of precious objects carefully wrapped in silk and linen and placed within a wooden box. In the box were parts of a Roman sceptrum, complete with glass and chalcedony orbs and an accompanying flowered clasp meant to hold an orb atop the sceptre. All likely date to the reign of Maxentius (312 c.e.). Although numerous numismatic, cartographical and aesthetic renderings of the imperial sceptre survive from antiquity, this was the first one to be found intact within the archaeological record (see Simon Corcoran's review of C. Panella, I segni del potere (2011) in JRS 105 (2015), 465–7). The orb and spear together personified the sovereignty of Roman emperors over the inhabited world — the oikoumene — and advertised this fact to visitors that glimpsed it. Such symbolic representations of the oikoumene were not just the domain of the emperor; they also proliferated within late antique literature in a variety of ways.

It is this spatial turn within literature that is investigated in Scott Fitzgerald Johnson's newest book, which argues for the proliferation of ‘cartographical thinking’ within late antique texts. J. defines the nature of Late Antiquity's turn towards ‘cartographical thinking’ in literature (200–900 c.e.) as the use of geographic discourse in order to cast the inhabited world as a symbolic container for knowledge and a device for discussing human cognition. As J. nimbly points out, all maps require a degree of interpretation: ‘A map that requires no interpretation at all, one that is in no way a reduction or systemization of the known world, must merely be the world itself’ (4). Just like a map, all texts are representations. They are restricted by language, itself an imprecise system of symbols that consequently can never produce an exact facsimile of the original place, idea or person. However, their organization can say a great deal. The book thus plots out late antique literary data on a spectrum of knowledge organization that runs between the encyclopaedia and the map, all the while addressing the themes of late antique signification, encyclopaedism and archiving practices.

The book is organized into five chapters with an accompanying introduction and conclusion. A useful concluding appendix (139–56) provides a chronological list of many of the astrological, astronomical, cosmographical, geographical and topographical texts written in Greek, Latin and Syriac from 1–700 c.e. In ch. 1, J. focuses on the literary genre of travel literature with close readings of Pausanias in the second century and Egeria in the late fourth century. J. alleges that regardless of the similarities or differences in the authors as pilgrims, they share the aesthetic of the ‘archive’ (17). The similar methods of collection and the arrangement of pre-existing knowledge are the pivotal connections to be focused upon. J. shows the parallels in the two authors' collection methods and underscores a fact recently explored within the study of information and library science as a field: the aesthetic of a list or accumulation is itself a form of argument.

The modern re-reading of late antique literature through a geographic framework that recognizes the principal connections between narrative and place is the focus of chs 3, 4 and 5. Here J. pulls from the theoretical work of digital humanists and theorists such as Franco Moretti, who have used underlying geographical structures as a means of uncovering narrative and better accessing a text's constructed universe. J. uses ch. 3 to ‘draw a map in words’ (76) for the Miracles of Thekla, but one wonders what can be gained by challenging students to engage in active literary cartography in the classroom. J. next ventures into the territories of Apostolic Geography as a ‘realm of knowledge’ (79). In concluding the book, J. returns to the close reading approach of ch. 1 with an in-depth assessment of the geographical frameworks embedded in the ninth-century Syriac writings of the bishops Thomas of Marga and Isho'dnah of Basra. Ninth-century ecclesiastical historians in the East fixated on looking to the west — to the Holy Land, Sinai, the Eastern Roman Empire and other sites to their west — as a means of connecting the East Syriac traditions with that of eastern Christianity generally. Collectively, J.’s focus on the ‘archival mode’ of writing exemplified in the surveyed texts is a further argument for Late Antiquity as a distinct field of study that is, in his words, neither independent of nor superior to classical literature (136).

The encyclopaedic and epistolary texts of Late Antiquity in particular are elevated to a more prestigious position in the literary hierarchy through J.’s book. In addition to redrawing boundaries of genre and representation, this book is itself part of its own scholarly accumulation growing in this current age of information. The ways in which users will access and understand knowledge through our deliberate and undeliberate archiving methods is something that digital humanists, GIS specialists, metadata librarians and information architects must regularly consider every day. Although many would quibble with J.’s assertion that the first encyclopaedias were written during the period of Late Antiquity (an honour often awarded to Amenemope of Egypt in the second millennium b.c.e.), the geographical literature and literary focus on both travel and physical movement that proliferated in the period is indeed an important means for assessing premodern knowledge organization over the longue durée and better understanding the transition from the ancient to the medieval world. J. soundly establishes the firm links between infrastructure, travel and the accumulation of information in Late Antiquity and poses a question as useful today as it is when reading Stephanus of Byzantium: what does the way in which information is organized say about us, our audience and our worldview?