Cartographic Humanism

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 Piechocki's timely book is well worth a read as it contemplates how Europe came to be understood in the early modern period. A scholar of the humanities, Piechocki is principally interested in how Europe has been brought into being rhetorically through maps, poetry, and prose. -- Journal of Historical Geography 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. --Michael Wintle European History Quarterly Cartographic Humanism is an ambitious work, seeking to elucidate nothing less than the Making of Early Modern Europe. -- Imago Mundi 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 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 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 Luis Vaz de Camoes--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 Camoes' 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 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