List of Figures
A Note on Translations
Introduction
1. Gridding Europe’s Navel: Conrad Celtis’s Quatuor Libri Amorum
secundum Quatuor Latera Germanie (1502)
2. A Border Studies Manifesto: Maciej Miechowita’s Tractatus de
Duabus Sarmatiis (1517)
3. The Alpha and the Alif: Continental Ambivalence in Geoffroy
Tory’s Champ fleury (1529)
4. Syphilitic Borders and Continents in Flux: Girolamo Fracastoro’s
Syphilis sive Morbus Gallicus (1530)
5. Cartographic Curses: Europe and the Ptolemaic Poetics of Os
Lusíadas (1572)
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Katharina N. Piechocki is associate professor of comparative
literature at Harvard University.
"Piechocki is conceptually rigorous, she reads many languages and
her research is impeccable. She is a careful critic but also a
deeply imaginative historian. This is a contribution to the 'darker
side' of cartography and the Renaissance, emphasizing the
relationship between writing and scholarship and the exercise of
power and exploitation, but its analysis never departs from the
measured and reflective."
*Times Higher Education*
“Through a close reading of literary texts, Cartographic Humanism
traces a shift in understanding of the shapes, meanings,
relationships, and constituent parts of the globe. Piechocki’s
linguistic range is astounding, and her fluid translations convey
the poetry of the original passages. She has assembled a rich array
of texts and images, and the imaginative ways in which she reads
them add up to something new and compelling. She draws out their
cartographic ideas and makes a convincing case for their centrality
in defining both Europe and its swaggering presence across the
globe. Her readings are fresh and energetic. The book will be a
major contribution to literary and cultural studies and their
intersection with the history of cartography.”
*Valerie A. Kivelson, author of Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land
and Its Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Russia*
"This is an ambitious book which convincingly achieves its goals.
It makes great claims for Humanism, the Renaissance and especially
for cartography in establishing a new idea of Europe, and presents
detailed evidence for those claims in closely argued and highly
detailed case studies."
*European History Quarterly*
"[A] timely book...well worth a read."
*Journal of Historical Geography*
"Katharina Piechocki’s Cartographic Humanism is an indispensable
book for scholars in many disciplines who think or write about
cartography, Europeanness, or [the] Renaissance."
*The Polish Review*
"Cartographic Humanism is the wonderful achievement of a major
critic, scholar, literary historian and multicultural thinker. With
wide-ranging scholarship, philological acuteness, sensitivity to
textual and poetic nuance, and enviable linguistic ease in Latin,
German, Polish, French, Italian, Spanish, English and Portuguese,
Katharina Piechocki offers a new understanding of the
sixteenth-century cartographic invention of Europe from a
pot-pourri of real and imagined borderlands. In taut analyses of
writers little studied outside specialist contexts or well-known
but not as mappers of a new Europe—Conrad Celtis, Maciej
Miechowita, Geoffroy Tory, Girolamo Fracastoro and Luís Vaz de
Camões—Piechocki tracks a cartopoietic story that 'starts' with
efforts to delimit central (Germanic), eastern (Polish or
'Sarmatic') and a core (French) 'Europe' from and against
indeterminate or non-existent Asian, Mediterranean and African
borders, passes through attempts to establish this 'place' against
an also indeterminate other—'America' or 'not-Europe,' all
intimately bound, in Fracastoro, to disease and/or its cure and to
the fictive imagination, and 'ends' with Camões’ nomad poetic
imposition of a colonizing Mediterranean map on an age-old Indian
Ocean one, a European cartography on and of the world. In the
effervescent Renaissance scholarship of history as cartography
Piechocki’s is a splendidly compelling new voice, one, too, that
lets us see hitherto silent or 'peripheral' actors as key to modern
Europe’s invention."
*Timothy Reiss, author of Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of
Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe*
"Cartographic Humanism is a tour de force. Impeccably researched
and beautifully written, this major intervention into the histories
of cartography and literature asks what we mean when we say
‘Europe.’ Piechocki addresses this question—so urgent today—by
exploring how early modern poets and mapmakers imagined
interstitial geographies and, thus, Europe’s ever-changing borders
and contact zones. Drawing from a rich multilingual archive of
humanists from Germany, Poland, France, Italy, and Portugal,
Cartographic Humanism shows that Europe is not a monolith and never
was. A must-read not only for scholars of early modernity, but for
anyone who has ever said the word ‘Europe.’”
*Phillip John Usher, author of The Exterranean: Extraction in the
Humanist Anthropocene*
“Cartographic Humanism is a deeply ambitious, exhaustively
researched, and carefully argued book that covers a number of
literary and historical issues in Renaissance European culture.
Piechocki successfully brings together the unwieldy materials of
language, local identification, a multidisciplinary approach, and
temporal breadth, providing valuable insight into Latin humanist
texts that undergird more familiar vernacular cartographic
texts.”
*William J. Kennedy, author of Petrarchism at Work: Contextual
Economies in the Age of Shakespeare*
"Katharina N. Piechocki’s elegant and incisive new work on how an
assemblage of sixteenth-century humanists took the classical
designation of 'Europa' and transformed it from a loosely defined
appendage to Asia’s landmass into a more sharply delineated
territory with political and metaphysical overtones."
*Isis*
"How did Europe emerge through pictorial maps, and what did early
Renaissance maps and cartopoetics have to do with that emergence?
Cartographic Humanism is an intertextual study of the history of
cartography that looks at transnational spaces of fantasy and
exploration, knowledge and emotion, and symbolic places and claimed
discovery. . . .In this effervescent book of literary criticism and
the map, there is much creative ground to be gained."
*Austrian History Yearbook*
"Piechocki's study is a complex contribution to the study of the
understanding of Europe in the Renaissance... Although this is
never explicitly mentioned by the author herself, this book can
also be understood as a serious examination of the reception
of Ptolemaic geography in the 15th and 16th centuries...
Piechocki's impressive contribution remeasures the broad field of
early modern European research."
*H-Soz-Kult (translated from German)*
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