Abstract
This periplus through ancient and early modern printed European geographic texts will focus not necessarily on the estimative descriptions or measurements of the world in ancient times, which led to gradual advances in early modern geography and cosmography, but on how ancient geography affected the political and cultural life of the educated individuals in Renaissance Europe. Apart from offering a sense of both the promise and limitations of early spatial visualizations via geography, this chapterwill evaluate the impact of geographic studies of the classics on Renaissance culture and the manner in which the prospective, comparative, and evaluative methods of classical geography were used to advance the intellectual landscape of early modern Europe. In addition, this chapter will demonstrate the rejuvenating strength that ancient texts inflected into the fabric of early modern geography, and their enabling capacity to become a channel of communication among scholars, a useful tool in education, and a mode of dialogical thinking. Viewed through the creative lens of intertex-tuality, the fact that early modern scientific geographers did not oust the traditional and erroneous beliefs of older writers, which were perpetuated in compilations of late antiquity, becomes a strong point rather than a weakness.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Daniela Dueck and Kai Brodersen, Geography in Classical Antiquity, Key Themes in Ancient History, gen. ed. P. A. Cartledge and P. D. A. Garnsey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 6–7.
Unless stated otherwise, references to the Shakespeare text are keyed to The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton & Company, Inc., 1997). Jonathan Bate, in Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), observes that Shakespeare’s use of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in both the Latin and the early Elizabethan translation, in the passage of Prospero’s renunciation of his rough magic, is Shakespeare’s “most powerful imitation of Ovid” (9). I would add that other writers, too, imitated Ovid copiously, including the palimpsest-like Latin and English versions of the geographic description by Dionysius Periegetes.
In charting the links between maps and history from antiquity to the present (including Geographical Information Systems), Norman J. W. Thrower notes the ascendancy of Ptolemy’s Geographia in Renaissance Europe and considers that local mappings of Europe had their origins in cosmological and geodetic concepts of classical antiquity; see Norman J. W. Thrower, “The Rediscovery of Ptolemy and Cartography in Renaissance Europe,” in Maps & Civilization: Cartography in Culture and Society, 3rd ed. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 58–90. In keeping with this idea of classical continuity, I argue that not only cartographic but also dramatic representation was strongly influenced by the Ptolemaic geometric, grid-like system of encompassing geographic space.
See Leo Bargrow, History of Cartography. 2nd ed. (1985; New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2010), 133. Bargrow makes the point that the spheres of influence in cartography in The Netherlands mingled with those in France, Lorraine, and Germany; as Barlow notes, “Political boundaries were not then as important as they are today and the cartographers of one territory often made maps of another” (132).
See James A. Knapp, Illustrating the Past in Early Modern England: The Representation of History in Printed Books (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003) for the relation between Holinshed’s Chronicles and chorog-raphy, with a citation from Ptolemy’s parallel between geography and chorography in terms of the body; geography is the representation of the whole portrait, while chorography represents a part, an eye or ear (183).
For Ptolemy’s citation with reference to landscape painting, see Edward S. Casey, Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 229.
For a citation of Ptolemy’s analogy in relation to city views in the French Renaissance, see Elisabeth Hodges, Urban Poetics in the French Renaissance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 45.
See also Louisa Mckenzie, The Poetry of Place: Lyric Landscape and Ideology in Renaissance Prance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 68.
For a focus on early modern nautical instruments and the relation between Apian and Frisius, see John Rennie Short, Making Space: Revisioning the World, 1475–1600 (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2004), 39.
Elisabeth Spiller, Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature: The Art of Making Knowledge, 1580–1670, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 2.
Copyright information
© 2015 Monica Matei-Chesnoiu
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Matei-Chesnoiu, M. (2015). Reclaimed Ancient and Renaissance Geographic Commentaries. In: Geoparsing Early Modern English Drama. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137469410_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137469410_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-50253-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-46941-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)