The Worldmakers moves beyond histories of globalization to explore how "the world" itself—variously understood as an object of inquiry, a comprehensive category, and a system of order—was self-consciously shaped by human agents. Gathering an international cast of characters, from Dutch cartographers and French philosophers to Portuguese and English poets, Ramachandran describes a history of firsts: the first world atlas, the first global epic, the first modern attempt to develop a systematic natural philosophy—all part of an effort by early modern thinkers to capture "the world" on the page.
The Worldmakers moves beyond histories of globalization to explore how "the world" itself—variously understood as an object of inquiry, a comprehensive category, and a system of order—was self-consciously shaped by human agents. Gathering an international cast of characters, from Dutch cartographers and French philosophers to Portuguese and English poets, Ramachandran describes a history of firsts: the first world atlas, the first global epic, the first modern attempt to develop a systematic natural philosophy—all part of an effort by early modern thinkers to capture "the world" on the page.
The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe
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The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe
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Overview
The Worldmakers moves beyond histories of globalization to explore how "the world" itself—variously understood as an object of inquiry, a comprehensive category, and a system of order—was self-consciously shaped by human agents. Gathering an international cast of characters, from Dutch cartographers and French philosophers to Portuguese and English poets, Ramachandran describes a history of firsts: the first world atlas, the first global epic, the first modern attempt to develop a systematic natural philosophy—all part of an effort by early modern thinkers to capture "the world" on the page.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226288826 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 05/31/2024 |
| Sold by: | OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED - EBKS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 298 |
| File size: | 12 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Mapping the Body, Mapping the World: Mercator's Atlas
The 1595 Duisburg edition of Mercator's Atlas opens with a now iconic engraving (fig. 4). A muscular man with a white beard and flowing red mantle scrutinizes a globe and a pair of compasses. Another globe rolls between his legs as the sky unfolds behind him. The entire tableau is encased within a classical architectural façade whose Corinthian columns may gesture symbolically toward the Pillars of Hercules. Above, two putti support an enormous astrolabe as though imitating the figure below them. Atlas sive Cosmographicae Meditationes de Fabrica Mundi et Fabricati Figura, reads the title: "Atlas or Cosmographical Meditations on the Making of the World and the Image of the Made [World]."
The iconographic concision of the image combines technical illustration with the visual rhetoric of contemporary allegorical prints and emblem books, offering a counterpart to the double title that explores representational and conceptual boundaries. For this text simultaneously names a person (Atlas) and a set of spiritual and aesthetic practices (cosmographic meditations). It reflects both on the making of the world itself (fabrica mundi) and on the figuration (in maps) of that world understood as an artifact (figura fabricati). Presenting a particular individual perspective as well as a universal gaze over global spaces, the frontispiece seeks to bring these opposing scales into relation. But as an allegory of making, it announces a bold new argument: the mapmaker embodies the world. In material and metaphorical ways, the human body and the global body become one.
COSMOGRAPHIC DESIRE
This striking visual proclamation identifies the Atlas, and its author, Gerhard Mercator, as icons of worldmaking. An innovator in the development of world mapping, Mercator, perhaps more than any other historical figure, is closely associated with a paradigmatic shift in the image of the world. His 1569 navigational projection — the so-called Mercator Projection — produced a vision of global space that remains familiar; it is even the basis of the Web Mercator platform used by Google Maps and in ArcGIS systems today. Beyond this technical breakthrough, his influential Atlas, whose title now names the genre, established the form, structure, and organization of world atlases for over two centuries, shaping cultural perceptions about the nature and order of the world itself. Thus, like the quincentennial commemorations of Columbus's first voyage to the Americas in 1992, the five hundredth anniversary of the Flemish mapmaker's birth in 2012 was also an occasion to reflect on the historical emergence of a modern world-picture. "He mapped the world, and we saw ourselves," began one popular tribute, honoring the transformative power of his cartographic achievements, which quite literally "changed the way we see the world."
Endlessly subject to revision, the world and its recognizably "modern" visual representations in maps slowly came into focus over the course of the sixteenth century. If the world map emblematizes a changing world picture, it is also almost synonymous with worldmaking. The history of planispheric images — from Juan de la Cosa's Mappa mundi (1500), the earliest extant European map to incorporate the Americas, to the 1599 Wright-Molyneux chart, which popularized the Mercator projection — tells the story of a fluctuating idea of a global totality. Mercator's Atlas marks the culmination of this decades-long effort. Its innovation lies in recognizing that the cosmographic challenge was not merely technological or political but rather metaphysical and therefore radically conceptual in scope. Ironically for a work hailed as a cartographic point of origin, most of its maps had already been published in the 1570s and 1580s; even the plates used for the Atlas were engraved not by Mercator but mostly by his sons and grandsons. The importance of the Atlas, however, lies in its understanding that reimagining the world as a visual whole on a map necessarily demanded a philosophical, theoretical counterpart — a reevaluation of the world's structure and the individual human being's position in relation to it. Moving beyond traditional cosmography's compendious data collection and compilation of maps, the Atlas defines an intellectual watershed by seeking to envision the totality of the world.
Cosmopoesis
Capturing the world in a single glance on a map demanded unique skills and a vast network of informants and sources. Mercator's career-long quest to understand and represent the world in its entirety therefore participates in the complex web of relations joining various sixteenth-century communities and interests. Mapping the world depended on a synthesis of information drawn from a heterogeneous group — from cosmographers, craftsmen, and printers, to sailors, diplomats, political patrons, philosophers, and would-be theologians. The mapmaker acted as a synapse, gathering, consolidating, and relaying visions of the world through a mix of technical skill, scientific knowledge, humanistic learning, and a capacious, creative imagination. Eventually settling in Duisburg after leaving volatile Louvain in 1552, Mercator crafted this intermediate professional position — between the anonymous craftspeople in artisanal workshops, the gentlemen-virtuosi of the court, and the orthodox schoolmen of the universities — for himself. As a calligrapher, instrument maker, cartographer, cosmographer, mathematician, astrologer, printer, and would-be philosopher, he was thus uniquely positioned to confront the challenge of worldmaking. In his diverse attempts to map the world — from the Orbis imago (1538) to the posthumously published Atlas — we see one of most multifaceted early modern attempts to grapple with the integration of new global knowledge into a coherent system.
The development of this lifelong experiment emerges clearly in Mercator's writing, for unlike many contemporary cosmographers, he returned repeatedly to questions of cosmic scope, rarely engaging in regional or national mapping projects. When he did focus on regional maps — such as his detailed atlas of Europe (1585) — they were conceived as part of an opus magnus on the whole world. In the late 1530s and 1540s, while still in Louvain and part of the circle around the Flemish physician, cosmographer, and mathematician Gemma Frisius, Mercator worked on terrestrial and celestial globes and dabbled in astrological questions. A recently discovered astrological disc made by him attests to an early interest in astral and cosmic matters by 1551.5 As early as 1563, his edited lecture notes on cosmography published by his son, Bartholomeo, gesture toward an ample understanding of the mapmaker's task: a marginal keyword describes his project as a "cosmopoeia" — literally, a world-making.
By the late 1560s, Mercator seems to have already envisioned a place for the Atlas outside the bounds of geography and within the broader realms of philosophy and theology. The introduction to the Chronologia (1569), his work on universal chronology published the same year as his famous map projection, describes what he intends to pursue:
At first, I had intended a work in two volumes, the description of the heavens and that of the earth. As, however, in philosophic study history takes the first place, I recognized that to cosmography and geography also belong the origin and the history of the heavens and of the earth and of their parts.
These lines connect the map, Nova et Aucta Orbis Descriptio (1569), to a larger philosophical project and also anticipate the Atlas's grander frame by placing both works beyond the typical scope of cosmographies, such as those of Apian or Münster, or of a largely geographic atlas, such as Abraham Ortelius's Theatrum orbis terrarum (1570). Mercator notes that the task of description leads to philosophic and historical questions of origin and order, of the temporal as well as spatial connections between the earth, the heavens, and their parts. A similar sentiment, articulated as a biographical narrative, emerges in the dedicatory letter to his 1578 edition of Ptolemy:
In my youth, geography first became my field of study, in which as I progressed, by using natural and geometrical speculation. ... I found marvels, not only in geography, but in the constitution of the whole machine of the world, much of which has until now been explored by no one.
Mercator traces the development of his own fascination with the "constitution of the machine of the world" (mundanae machinae constitutione), that is, the entire structure of the universe itself, to his early interest in geography. Pursuing interests in geometry and natural philosophy, he moves beyond the confines of geography and casts himself as an intellectual explorer who seeks what "has until now been explored by no one." Shifting from the earthly plane to a cosmic vision, these passages chart a movement from the act of representation to a reflection on the process and consequences of representation, from a technical mapping of the world to a theoretical meditation on cosmographic themes.
In his Life of Mercator (1595), included in all versions of the Atlas, Walter Ghim also traces these ideas to the dedicatory letter prefixed to Mercator's maps of France and Germany, published in 1585:
The arrangement and order of the work demanded that I first treat of the making of the world and the arrangement of its parts generally; then of the order and motion of the celestial bodies; thirdly of their nature, radiation, and conflict in their workings, in order to inquire more truthfully into astrology; fourthly, of the elements; fifthly, of the description of kingdoms and the whole-earth; sixthly, of the genealogies of princes from the beginning of the world, in order to investigate the migration of peoples and the first inhabitants of the earth and the times of inventions and antiquities. For this is the natural order of things, which easily demonstrates their causes and origins and is the best guide to true science and knowledge.0
Almost twenty years after the Chronologia, Mercator's project has crystallized in form, but what he envisions bears little resemblance to contemporary map books. It might best be described as a world-systems theory, a comprehensive exposition of a vision of world order, a structuring of all knowledge that moves systematically from a macrocosmic, celestial, and planetary plane to a microcosmic, socio-political, and individual plane. While this vision was never completely executed, its shape seems clear. It was to be in five parts: a treatise on the creation of the world; a description of the heavens; the description of the earth; the genealogy and the history of states; and finally, a universal chronology, from the Bible to the present. When thinking of representing the world, what Mercator has in mind is a new organon.
Mapping and Mimesis
The posthumous publication of the Atlas marks the final form of Mercator's lifelong ambition, whose evolution spans most of the sixteenth century and bears its imprint. From a literary historical perspective, the volume's title is striking and strange. It introduces a new nomenclature for the map book, replacing the conventional "theater" or "mirror" metaphors with the materiality of a human body. It therefore effectively interrogates and reimagines the mimetic claims of the mapping enterprise. The Atlas troubles the illusion of the map as a transparently mimetic object — a "mirror of the world" — by highlighting the function of the human mapmaker as a mediator; it is through his particular perspective and technical gaze that we see the world visualized on the page. The title's strategic balancing of two terms, Atlas sive ("or") cosmographicae meditationes, joins the external spatiality of the material world with the internal spaces of the corporeal body and the imagining self, exploring the favorite early modern trope of the "great body of the world."
Mercator's intuition that the task of mapping the world was intimately linked to knowledge of the self is clearly on display in the Atlas. It touches on a fundamental dilemma that underlies the cartographic enterprise: to represent the world, the mapmaker must first create it. At the opening of the Geography, Ptolemy describes the discipline as a mimesis: "Geographia is an imitation [mimesis] through drawing of the entire known part of the world together with the things that are, broadly speaking, connected with it." But describing the practice of world mapping as mimesis is at once deeply intuitive and utterly counterintuitive. Though we imagine that the map represents the 'real' world with all its particularities, the world map has no external referent because a simultaneous view of the globe's convexity cannot be captured. Opening the three-dimensional sphere onto a two dimensional plane is a heuristic exercise forged through the union of art and number, the synthetic imagination of the mapmaker and his grasp of mathematical geometry. As Christian Jacob argues, the map is "the materialization of an abstract intellectual order extracted from the empirical universe" so that "without the map, the world has no contour, neither limit, form, nor dimension"; it creates "the world" as a clear concept and field of inquiry in the very act of representing it. "The world" as a visual object comes into existence only through its representation on a map; it is always posterior to its supposed imitation. In world mapping, creation and imitation become indistinguishable.
This understanding of the cartographic task invests the individual mapmaker and atlas-compiler with tremendous power. He is no mere copyist who mechanically reproduces a finite object from life. Instead, he becomes a worldmaker — one who creates in the very act of representing. As the world is known and produced through the body of the artisan-cartographer, from the intellectual processes of abstraction to the manual skill of drawing and engraving, the particular and the universal interpenetrate. From this perspective, the mapmaker mimics the creative deity, activating a complex analogy between human and divine making. By reframing the map book as a "cosmographical meditation," Mercator emphasizes its place within a spiritual context of meditative contemplation even as he celebrates its scientific mastery. Eventually, the cartographer will threaten to displace the theologian: Mercator's final work, published as the first part of the Atlas, is a commentary on Genesis entitled "De mundi creatione ac fabrica" ("On the Creation and Making of the World").
The Atlas rests on a fusion of the technical, the theological, and the poetic, self-consciously asserted in its subtitle, "de fabrica mundi et fabricati figura." Fabrica and figura are key terms here, derived from quite different (though related) discourses. Associated with technical manuals in the early modern period, fabrica, from the Latin fabricare (to make), refers to the artisan's workshop, and in a transferred sense to his art, trade, or profession, or to the products of his craftsmanship. Figura, on the other hand, draws on a lexical history that derives primarily from rhetoric and aesthetics, and then becomes linked to biblical hermeneutics. Concerned with "plastic form," with artistic or poetic figuration, it confronts the problem of mimesis — the relation between original and copy. As Erich Auerbach has famously shown, figura also acquires a historical dimension, as a term that mediates different but related historical events. Deploying these terms in tandem, Mercator suggests that worldmaking through a map book requires the union of technical craft and aesthetic criteria to make historical connections between past, present, and future. Worldmaking in this view demands the skills of artisan, poet, and prophet.
These analogies between making and representing in the Atlas explain why the growth of world atlases as a genre is so central to the world's emergence as a distinct object of inquiry in the early modern period. The term "world" acquired a stable meaning only when it had acquired visual form in images that were rapidly canonized as typus orbis terrarum — the ideal type or image of the world. If, as Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have noted, scientific atlases register an outbreak of epistemic anxiety, then the signs of global redefinition should be legible in the outpouring of cosmographies and cosmographic atlases in the sixteenth century — a process recorded in the conceptual leap from Ortelius's Theatrum orbis terrarum (1570), considered the first world atlas, to Merctaor's Atlas (1595), the first map book to bear that name. The crystallization of the geographic atlas as a genre occurs in tandem with the crystallization of "the world" as a visually recognizable "working object."
(Continues…)
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