`MAPS`

The concept of mapping is used so widely as to be almost meaningless in its capaciousness. At the same time, perceptions of the purpose of a map in the spatial sense—a representation of geographical rather than of metaphorical or discursive space—are very limited. Many twenty-first-century persons see today’s maps as straightforward, objective tools for way finding, and premodern exemplars that look “different” by dint of their unfamiliar conventions and visual elements as modes of propaganda or of imagination rather than as modes of information. Yet for thousands of years, maps have had a much wider range of uses, across cultures, than merely way finding. In order to understand geographical maps from the point of view of the history of information, it is important to be mindful of the wide spectrum of purposes to which maps were put.

A map—in both the narrower geographical and the broader metaphorical senses—is essentially a diagram that orients things or concepts in relation to one another, or within a physical space, be it a village or the world. A map may be composed of words, lines, illustrations, symbols, or concepts, and a map can take a variety of physical or virtual forms. A map is not an attempt to replicate the real world with the exactitude of a trompe l’oeil painting, but rather a reconstruction of space, one that selects and organizes information in ways that make it visible and usable for particular purposes. Maps necessarily emphasize and enlarge some features and represent them using visual *codes rather than via images devised to look as naturalistic as possible. Readers are expected to know these codes: for example, a printed map may contain numerous instances of the identical schematic stamp to denote houses, but viewers are expected to know that this does not imply that all these houses looked the same, or even that each house stamp necessarily indicated a single house. These variations between the “real world” and the map are more productively understood as practical and strategic decisions that are essential for and inherent to cartography, rather than as distortions of what the eye would see on the ground or from a fixed point above it.

What distinguishes the geographical map, in the context of the history of information, is that it selects and positions information on a diagram that represents physical space. Maps also organize space into named, digestible chunks—into the “Orient” and the “West,” into continents (where do they start and end, and which islands are included?), and even into the boundaries between named oceans, seas, and rivers (figure 1). These organizing spatial structures or metageographies, as Martin Lewis and Kären Wigen termed them, do not exist in nature but rather are cartographic constructions that essentialize regions and devise boundaries so as to make topographical information legible and powerful within the viewer’s geopolitical framework.

Geographical maps across cultures and periods take a great diversity of forms in many media, from manual engravings on (relatively) hard objects composed of metal, stone, wood, glass, or clay; to representations drawn or painted on pliable material such as *papyrus, bark, animal skin, or paper; to maps co-constituted alongside their medium, as in the case of textile maps. Maps may be two-dimensional sheets, multidimensional, or virtual, taking the form of globes, time-lapse video maps, and *digital maps. Their contents may be applied manually in ink, paint, or other substances (in the case of manuscript maps), or transferred by a mechanical printing process onto multiple exemplars. Textual geographies, such as those that ripple through conquest literature and weighty geographical tomes penned in sixteenth-century Spain, conjure up maps, from words, in the mind’s eye of the reader. Mural maps on walls, such as the late fourth-century BCE Mayan example in La Sufricaya, a royal residence in Petén, Guatemala, lay out a culture’s—or patron’s—view of the world or the cosmos and their place in it. Maps from such disparate contexts as La Sufricaya and late medieval Europe represented, on maps, not just topography but also people, cities, structures, events, and cosmology, while also making political claims.

`Figure 1. Sebastian Münster, “Typus cosmographicus universalis” in` `Nouus orbis regionum ac insularum ueteribus incognitarum, edited by Johann Huttich (Basel, 1532). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, call no. 1986` + `106.`

One type of map did not gradually become extinct in order to give way to another, better mode. Rather, a number of cartographic modes tended to coexist in a given time and place. In thirteenth-century Europe, for example, one might encounter mappaemundi (world maps), regional itinerary maps, portolan charts (on which most information pertained to coastal regions), and local maps produced for legal or administrative purposes. Medieval maps were primarily artifacts of contemplation, not of navigation (figure 2).

On a map that encompasses both land and water, topographical forms (representations of physical or natural features) shown are likely to include the boundary between land and sea, or the courses of rivers. Words may delineate place names, historical events, or explanations of symbols and illustrations, but they can also serve rhetorical purposes—assuring the viewer of the map’s newness or efficacy, or proclaiming ownership, for example. While a map is often devised around a geographical grid, this does not require the information on it be positioned with a particular level of precision. Nor does the cartographic representation of space presume any particular scale, magnification, technique, or style. What devising a map does require, more urgently perhaps than does devising a book, is selection: what does one put in a finite space? The contents of maps reveal choices about what labor and expenses to shoulder—clues about their makers, patrons, and *publishers, and about the multifarious purposes to which maps were put. Conversely, attending to makers, audiences, and purposes helps to explain the what, how, and why of information on maps.

`Figure 2. Zonal medieval map:` `Sexta figura. Hec figura servit nono capitulo pro divisione terre per climata. Septima figura. Hec figura servit xiiii. capitulo & pluribus aliis pro divisione terre in tres partes` `…` `In Pierre d’Ailly, [Ymago Mundi], ([Louvain?], [1483?]). Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, call no. A483 A293i/1-SIZE.`

Not everything on a map is about space per se. Maps encode information about things beyond topography (physical elements of the terrain), such as peoples, plants, animals, and human-made structures (figure 3). In the case of premodern maps, historians of cartography have traditionally assumed either that nontopographical elements were decorative ways of filling spaces for which no information was available, or that they functioned solely as propaganda. More recently, historians of science, literary scholars, and art historians have challenged these assumptions and worked to analyze and historicize visual aspects of maps. Consequently, there has been a move away from dismissing these elements using such terms as decoration, myth, and legend, and toward analyzing these images in relation to a wide range of textual and visual sources in order to uncover the cultural work they performed. In this way, scholars are shedding light on how map illustrations also performed the work of making knowledge, and thus how they form part of the broader history of information.

`Figure 3. Jodocus Hondius,` `Tabula geograph[ica], in qua Europae, Africae, Asiaeq[ue] et circu[m]jacentium insularum orae maritimae accurate describuntur et ad intelligentia[m] navigationum Indicaru[m] accommodantur` `(Amsterdam, 1611). Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, at Brown University, call no. F611 P811r/1-SIZE.`

Both the types of information maps contained and the visual codes via which this information was expressed varied with the uses of maps. Maps for legal and administrative purposes were made not just by professional artists and mapmakers, but also by local civic officials and townspeople. In the final quarter of the sixteenth century, the Spanish crown commissioned two surveys of its domains: the Relaciones Geográficas (Geographical Accounts) of Spain’s overseas empire, and the Relaciones Topográficas (Topographical Accounts) of peninsular Spain. The crown dispatched lengthy questionnaires across its domains, requesting information about populations, history, and the built environment. A number of the replies that returned included local maps, often devised by the region’s inhabitants. In seventeenth-century Muscovy, local inhabitants made hundreds of detailed manuscript sketch maps of small areas, in the service of property disputes. These contexts often emphasized natural features such as trees, rivers, and changes in elevation that served as boundary markers.

Perhaps the most panoramic form of map is the world map. These maps conjure up an imaginative viewpoint far above the earth, a bird’s-eye view that sees the entirety of a globe in one sweep of the gaze. Flat, physical exemplars—rolled, in sheets, or bound into codices—allow one to look both deeply and broadly at maps as bearers of information.

In the early Middle Ages, zonal maps, drawing on the writings of such Greco-Latin authors as Ptolemy, Pliny, and Aristotle, as well as on the works of medieval scholars like Albertus Magnus and Pierre d’Ailly, laid out the earth’s geography in the form of zones of habitation (figure 2). Advocates of zonal theory divided the spherical earth into five zones: uninhabitable zones at the two poles, an impassable torrid zone at the equator, and two habitable, temperate zones that separated the torrid zone from the polar zones. These maps occasionally subdivided the northern temperate zone into seven climates (climata) in order to show how, as one approached the two extremes of latitude, it became increasingly difficult to sustain civil human societies or even properly formed bodies.

Such maps transmitted, in graphic form, aspects of the geoclimatological framework known as *humoral theory. Classical humoralism, based on a fifth-century BCE corpus associated with the physician Hippocrates, was undergirded by a theory of bodily humors. Four humors—blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile—were affected by external factors such as local climate, astrological constellations, and geographical latitude, and they linked the minds and bodies of individuals to their environment. Thus, from at least the Middle Ages, world maps in Europe were visual diagrams via which the mutability of the human body was articulated. These maps illustrated the geographer Ptolemy’s assertion that life at the same parallels would have similar characteristics. By extension, they made implicit arguments about how nature and culture varied across space.

In the late twelfth century, a new mode of world mapping depicted human—and particularly biblical—history within a geographical framework. Often denoted as the mappaemundi tradition, this mode showed the inhabited world as a circle circumscribing a T-shaped area formed by the River Nile, the Black Sea, or River Don, and the Mediterranean Sea. These waterways dissected known lands into the three portions said to have been populated by Noah’s three sons. Mappaemundi placed Jerusalem at the (spiritual) center of the world and were oriented to place the East—the location of the Earthly Paradise—at the top. With Jerusalem—a region perfectly placed within the northern temperate zone—at the center, the further one traveled toward the outer, northern and southern edges of the map, the more extreme the climate became. Mappaemundi often placed representations of monstrous peoples at these edges, and particularly at the southern edge of the world. Medieval mapmakers drew here from works of classical natural history such as Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (ca. 77–79 CE). Pliny extrapolated that regions most distant from the Mediterranean were inhabited by a variety of species of monstrous peoples deformed in body or in behavior (and therefore in mind) by the unsavory latitude or climate of their local environment. This theory could be squared with biblical tradition: for example, the descendants of Cain (who killed his brother Abel) and of Ham (who jeered at his father, Noah) were thought to have been cursed by God. By the fifteenth century, there emerged a tradition that Noah had given Africa to Ham, and that Ham’s descendants began to turn black as a lasting sign of Ham’s sin. Mappaemundi thus functioned as analytical spaces in which information about geography and humankind could be fused with biblical *exegesis. They appeared in geographical treatises and religious books; a hand-sized example known as the Psalter Map appears in a late thirteenth-century book of psalms in the British Library. At the other end of the scale, enormous exemplars hung on cathedral walls or in palaces; the Hereford Map, circa 1300, continues to hang in the eponymous English cathedral.

During the fifteenth century, the Geography of the second-century CE Greco-Egyptian geographer Ptolemy began to circulate in Latin translation. Contained within it was a system for representing the world on a plane, using lists of latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates for places. Ptolemaic maps made it a simple matter to see which regions lay at the same latitude and which, by extension, could be expected to have a similar climate. Such expectations would perplex sixteenth-century European travelers to the northeastern seaboard of what would later be called North America; settlers struggled to tend Old World crops that had not been bred for the swampy summers and frigid winters of the region they optimistically called New England, whose temperatures were more extreme than those in European regions that lay at the same latitudes.

During the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, mapmakers in Europe faced the prospect of evaluating new information about geography and the natural world, which had been amassed via oceanic voyages, with ideas about distant regions that had long circulated in writings from classical antiquity, religious scripture, and medieval travel and natural historical works. The long sixteenth century witnessed an efflorescence of world maps. A number of sheet maps and atlases survive from Spain, Portugal, and Normandy in manuscript form; Venice and Rome were early centers of printed maps and atlases, as were the German-speaking lands, soon followed by the Low Countries in the second half of the sixteenth century. Maps that depicted the world’s peoples would essentialize the appearance and characteristics of peoples of the Americas. By devising distinct motifs for each region—the city of Tenochtitlán for Mexico, eaters of human flesh for Brazil, giants for Patagonia, and so on—these maps made visual and explicit the humoral connection between climate, geography, and human bodies (figure 4).

The era of European oceanic exploration, colonization, and empire was also one of maps that attempted to hem in and claim lands that had barely been visited by the states that purported to have surveyed them. Through maps, monarchs and administrators made arguments about territory and identity. Yet not only were distances such as longitude at sea difficult to measure, but establishing fixed points in desert, jungle, or forest was far from straightforward. The nineteenth-century British surveyor and explorer Robert Herman Schomburgk’s survey of what became known as British Guiana—a traverse survey, or a survey made by transcribing a route through difficult terrain, and the sight lines taken from it—involved constructing fixed points (landmarks at known coordinates) in the terrain, even though few if any would be able to replicate the journey and authenticate them. On the other side of the globe, European mapping in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries invented the “Indian subcontinent” as a region. The nineteenth-century imperial cartographic ideal of the trigonometrical survey—a new mapping technique that bound a series of control points to each other without reference to astronomical features, deemed to be systemic, coherent, and exact—was observed in cartographic rhetoric more than it could be enacted on the ground. In the Americas, Indigenous peoples’ geographical knowledge was embedded in European cartography, gathered in dialogue or via coercion, with the aid of guides, or via Indigenous maps. Place names were often adopted, but in many cases were later excised, to be replaced with European ones. In imperial settings, cartography was a technique practiced in negotiation with local elites, guides, and informants, even if these activities go unmentioned on the maps.

`Figure 4.` `Vallard Atlas, 1547, map 10, Central America. The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, call no. HM 29.`

In the early twenty-first century, the ideal of cartographic objectivity persists, despite the tensions created by digital mapping, which offers almost infinite ways of performing cartography as bespoke tailoring—or as manipulative skewing—of information for particular purposes and audiences. What the seeming redundancy of having a sense of direction or locational memory will do to mental and externalized maps in the future remains to be seen.

Surekha Davies

`FURTHER READING`

D. Graham Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed, 2000; Surekha Davies, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human, 2016; Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire, 1997; Evelyn Edson, The World Map, 1300–1492, 2007; Valerie Kivelson, Cartographies of Tsardom, 2006; Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents, 1997; Barbara E. Mundy, The Making of New Spain and the Relaciones Geográficas, 1996; Ricardo Padrón, The Spacious Word, 2006.