Cartographic Humanism: The Making of Early Modern Europe
Katharina N. Piechocki
Abstract
What is “Europe,” and when did it come to be? While in the Renaissance the term “Europe” circulated widely, the continent itself was only in the making in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Cartographic Humanism sheds new light on how humanists negotiated and defined Europe’s boundaries at a momentous shift in the continent’s formation: when a new imagining of Europe was driven by the rise of cartography. This tool of geography, philosophy, and philology was used not only to represent but, more importantly, also to shape and promote an image of Europe quite unparalleled in previous centuri ... More
What is “Europe,” and when did it come to be? While in the Renaissance the term “Europe” circulated widely, the continent itself was only in the making in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Cartographic Humanism sheds new light on how humanists negotiated and defined Europe’s boundaries at a momentous shift in the continent’s formation: when a new imagining of Europe was driven by the rise of cartography. This tool of geography, philosophy, and philology was used not only to represent but, more importantly, also to shape and promote an image of Europe quite unparalleled in previous centuries. Engaging with poets, historians, and mapmakers, this study resists an easy categorization of the continent, scrutinizing Europe as an unexamined category that demands a much more careful and nuanced investigation than scholars of early modernity have hitherto undertaken. Cartographic Humanism charts new itineraries across Europe from the perspective of comparative literature. It aims for a wide geographic scope, bringing France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Portugal into a lively, interdisciplinary dialogue.
Keywords:
cartography,
comparative literature,
Europe,
Renaissance humanism,
continental thinking,
epistemology,
Conrad Celtis,
Maciej Miechowita,
Girolamo Fracastoro,
Geoffroy Tory,
Luís de Camões
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2019 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780226641188 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: May 2020 |
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226641218.001.0001 |
