The World Map as an Emblem: Abraham Ortelius and the Stoic Contemplation

Although the close association of word and image in medieval cartography is widely acknowledged, the significance of the relationship after the rediscovery of Ptolemy's Geography and throughout the Renaissance has been overlooked, despite Abraham Ortelius's choice of the term ‘Reader’ for users of the Theatrum orbis terrarum (1570). In this paper, the map of the world, which (as in Ptolemy's Geography) opens Ortelius's Theatrum, is analysed to show how Ortelius's concept of space was very different from Ptolemy's. Attention is drawn to the content of the texts on the map, to Ortelius's notion of geography as the eye of history, and to the importance in the Renaissance of the emblem as a conceit, or device, in the system of acquisition and transmission of knowledge. As in emblems, the words on Ortelius's map are not there to explain or to comment on what is seen but to give the image meaning; the purpose of the map is to invite contemplation of God's world. The map is contradictory, however; for Ortelius's accurate and up‐to‐date presentation of the physical world is qualified by a verbal statement that the world is ‘nothing’, a mere pinpoint in the immensity of the universe. It is concluded that Ortelius was not a geographer in the same way Ptolemy was, and that Ortelius was using geography as a philosopher and his world map as an illustration of his moral and religious thinking.     

Life Beyond Judgment: Communication. Response to Section III of The Ways of Judgment by Oliver O'Donovan

Abstract

This article is a response to Section III of Oliver O'Donovan's The Ways of Judgment, addressing his account of the Church's "higher sociality" as the proper context for all theological reflection on politics. In particular, it explores the importance of the theme of communication, affirming many of O'Donovan's central instincts in this area though questioning his emphasis on the role of the individual believing heart as the privileged site of ecclesial transformation of the world.     

A Byzantine hagiographical parody: Life of Mary the Younger

Abstract

In this paper, it is argued that The Life of Mary the Younger, an anonymous Byzantine text of the eleventh century, has a conscious intertextual dialogue with the oldest Byzantine Life venerating a holy woman, the Life of Macrina written by her brother, Gregory of Nyssa, between 380 and 383. The intertextual relation between these two female Lives takes the form of parody. Following Linda Hutcheon's theory of parody, this article shows how the anonymous hagiographer of Mary reworks Gregory's authoritative text to create a new work, a parody in terms of postmodern literary criticism, whose aim was to criticise old and contemporary customs, conventions and ideologies. In other words, the present article approaches and decodes the literariness, the function and ideology of Mary's Life in the light of Macrina's Life.     

Days of those made like me: retrospective pleasure,sexual knowledge,and C. P. Cavafy's homobiographics

Abstract

This article begins with a comparison between the anonymous Roman d'un inverti (1894/5) and Cavafy's poem ‘Να με?νει’, and then proceeds to read Cavafy's private notes and key erotic poems in the context of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century discourses about non-normative sexuality. During that period, and in a discursive domain dominated by sexological case studies, the deviant sexual life story was published in order to titillate, check, control and medicalize. In Cavafy's texts we see, instead, a network of homosexual life stories proposed as a platform for the conceptualization of novel sexual, aesthetic and social technologies, as well as a new ethics of contact.     

Saxton's Maps of England and Wales: The Accuracy of Anglia and Britannia and Their Relationship to Each Other and to the County Maps

ABSTRACT

From measurements of the graticules on Saxton's two general maps of England and Wales—the atlas map Anglia and the wall map Britannia—together with other evidence, it is argued that neither map was drawn according to any specific projection, but that both were effectively produced as ‘flat-earth’ maps with the graticules superimposed afterwards. Digital versions of Saxton's maps and of a modern map, the 1:1 million Ordnance Survey transport map, are used in a number of comparisons by means of the computer program MapAnalyst. These comparisons allow the scales of the two Saxton maps to be determined. They also show that the maps are of almost the same accuracy in terms of the positioning of settlements, typically within about 4.6 kilometres, in spite of a difference in scale of a factor of about 3.6. This fact and the direct comparison of the two Saxton maps in MapAnalyst show that they are basically the same map, and it is concluded that a version of the wall map was the first to be drawn and that Anglia is a reduced copy prepared for the atlas. The lengths of Saxton's miles as used on the two maps are calculated and compared with other determinations. The relationship between the two general maps and the county maps is briefly considered, and it is provisionally concluded that the relationship is a close one.     

Caspar Vopel's Ventures in Sixteenth-Century Celestial Cartography

ABSTRACT

This paper concerns the undertakings in celestial cartography of the sixteenth-century Cologne cartographer Caspar Vopel. Copies of his printed celestial globe and of the celestial maps included on his world map are also described. Vopel's celestial mappings display his extraordinary interest in astronomical myths through a series of conspicuous iconographic features. In particular, Vopel's introduction of the images of Antinous and Coma Berenices is revealed to have been inspired by a humanist edition of the Ptolemaic star catalogue. Finally, a study of the celestial maps on the copies of Vopel's world map by Valvassore (1558) and by Van den Putte (1570) shows that these represent different editions of Vopel's world map and that the celestial maps on the world map of Matteo Pagano were in turn copied from those on the world map of Valvassore.     

Honorary Secretary’s Report for 1964

Abstract

The glazing scheme of the chapter-house at York Minster contains the best preserved ensemble of narrative glass of its period in England, and is the only one to survive in any of the great polygonal chapter-houses. Although it is frequently mentioned in general works on the Minster and its glass, there has been no sustained attempt to reconstruct the sequence of the panels or to consider the iconography of the scheme in relation to its setting. This study aims to highlight the significance of the scheme as a whole by focusing on just one of its seven windows: that in the north-west corner, which features a life of St Katherine of Alexandria. Using unpublished antiquarian sources alongside textual versions of Katherine's vita, it outlines a possible sequence for the window's disordered panels. It then goes on to analyse the window and its iconography within the context of the chapter-house, considering how it constructs its own particular version of this highly popular narrative. The results suggest that the scheme as a whole is a high-status product which employs complex narrative strategies. It is an important testament to the sophistication of glazed narratives in the period as well as to the ambitions of York's chapter.     

Übersicht der Tätigkeit internationaler Geographenkongresse auf dem Gebiete der Geschichte der Kartographie

Abstract

This paper surveys the career of Benedetto Bordon as a miniaturist, designer of woodcuts, and cartographer. Although from Padua, Bordon worked primarily in Venice where he illuminated religious and classical texts and official ducal documents destined for Venetian noblemen. The writer argues that Bordon designed woodcut illustrations for books printed by Aldus Manutius and others, in addition to the woodcut maps in his 1528 book on islands in the MediteiTanean, Atlantic, and Caribbean. Bordon's lost world map of 1508 is discussed in relation to the map‐making activities of Francesco Rosselli, the Florentine miniaturist and engraver who was in Venice in 1504 and 1508, and in relation to a circle of Venetian scholars and patricians interested in Ptolemy's Cosmographia and in the mapping of the New World.     

A Critical Reappraisal of Eustathios Makrembolites’ Hysmine and Hysminias

Abstract

Despite the massive amount of scholarly literature on Iconoclasm and its aftermath, there are really only two major publications that deal specifically and synthetically with ninth-century art. One of these is André Grabar's magisterial L'iconoclasme byzantin, a chronological analysis of monuments and texts; the other is Robin Cormack's short but insightful essay in Iconoclasm, the collection of papers originally presented at Birmingham in 1975, which asks ‘whether the discussion of religious images stimulated by Iconoclasm changed the nature of Byzantine Art’. My aim is rather different. Rather than presenting an encyclopedic overview, this article attempts to crawl into the fabric of Byzantine culture: to see and understand Byzantine art of the ninth century as the Byzantines saw and understood it. It follows that the material presented has not been segregated into the familiar (and often useful) categories of style, iconography, and context, for, to the Byzantines, the three were neither exclusive nor separable. For similar reasons, I have deemphasized any linear progression that might imposed with art historical hindsight on the distant past, and have thereby underplayed the flashes of innovation, novelty and erudition that such detachment allows. These sparks are probably more visible (and certainly more appealing) to twentieth-century art historians than they were to the ninth-century Byzantines, for whom, as we shall see, the power of tradition militated against individual creativity, and artists on the whole remained anonymous artisans. In my attempt to look at Byzantine art from the inside rather than from the outside I have, in other words, concentrated on the fluid interface between objects, and the shifting dialogue between objects and context. This is because what interests me here is how Byzantine ideas about art (their theories), Byzantine perception (how the Byzantines saw), and the artifacts themselves (the practice) come together in the ninth century: how art, that preeminent social construct, worked in the years after Iconoclasm.     

Oliver O'Donovan's Critique of Autonomy

Abstract

More than any other contemporary theologian, Oliver O'Donovan has revived political theology as a field of enquiry. Yet O'Donovan has been consistent in his critique of the modern idea of autonomy, judging it to be at odds with the more communitarian idea of covenanted community found in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. He contrasts this modern idea, and its political implications, with the older biblical idea, also adding some basic points from Aristotle's idea of the polis. But unlike many contemporary communitarians, O'Donovan is also able to incorporate the idea of human rights into his political theology. He sees this supposedly modern idea having fuller precedence in the biblical idea of mishpat ("justice"), which he takes to be God's primordial claim on His covenanted community, a claim that sufficiently grounds both individual rights and communal rights and which enables them to function together. However, O'Donovan draws the line when it comes to the modern social contract theory, arguing that it is at odds with biblical teaching that the primary responsibility of rulers is to divine law. While agreeing with O'Donovan's rejection of autonomy and his acceptance of human rights, this paper argues against O'Donovan's theological rejection of social contract theory. Instead, it argues that a social contract is consistent with the doctrine of the covenant; indeed that the very possibility of the social contract is best explained by the doctrine of the covenant, and that this acceptance of the social contract serves the best political interests of covenanted communities (like the Jewish People and the Christian Church) in an otherwise secular world.     

A Devonian fish fauna from subsurface sediments in the eastern Officer Basin,South Australia

This paper reports the discovery of three of the most iconic New Caledonian endemic genera, Amphorogyne, Paracryphia and Phelline, as dispersed leaf cuticle fossils in the early Miocene of New Zealand. New Caledonia's endemic angiosperm families have given it a reputation as one of the most interesting botanical regions in the world, but unfortunately it has no known pre-Pleistocene Cenozoic plant fossil record. A once more widespread distribution of its key plants in the context of a cooling and drying Neogene world suggests the current vegetation of New Caledonia is the result of contraction, or even a migration, from more southerly landmasses. Thus, New Zealand may have been a source of at least some of New Caledonia's plants.     

Controlling the Waters of Granducal Florence: A New Look at Stefano Bonsignori's View of the City (1584)

ABSTRACT

A striking feature of Stefano Bonsignori's Nova pulcherrimae civitatis Florentiae topographia accuratissime delineata, printed in 1584, is the pre-eminence of the Arno River and the detailed depiction of a variety of often quite minor water-related structures. This large (nine-sheet) map was dedicated to Francesco I de' Medici, Granduke of Florence. Contemporary initiatives and legislation as well as works of art and literature reveal that water management had been an important aspect of the policies of Francesco's father, Cosimo I, whose achievements had transformed the city's landscape and whose efforts earned the Medici ruler the title of Granduke of Tuscany in 1569. Bonsignori's portrayal of urban structures was created as a celebration of Cosimo's architectural legacy, and the depiction of the Arno, with its embankments and riverside structures, along with some of the city's fountains and wells, acknowledged granducal ambition to control its waters.     

Chronicle for 1993

Abstract

Theory is not a goal in itself but a means of enriching the history of cartography by stimulating new research questions and objectives. In this paper the concept of ‘transparent maps’ (carriers of an image of the external reality of the world) and ‘opaque maps’ is introduced. The notion is approached structurally (standards of graphical representation, drawing, geometry, text); through the sociology of the map (map makers, institutions, the public); and through seeing maps in their cultural and historical context (an approach which raises issues of the definitional boundaries of the history of cartography and which is arguably one of the most stimulating perspectives today as fostered by, in particular, contributors to the History of Cartography). Finally, attention is drawn to three important topics for the research agenda: the links between maps and culture; maps as a language of communication and as instruments of power; and the links between perception, logic and mnemonics.     

Der erste Europäische Straßenatlas

ABSTRACT

Imitations of famous Dutch wall maps originally produced in Amsterdam by F. de Wit and W. J. Blaeu have recently been rediscovered in Italy. In Bologna, in the archive of Opera Pia dei Poveri Vergognosi, is a set of Blaeu's four wall maps of the continents, engraved on new plates by Pietro Todeschi and published by Giuseppe Longhi. The value of the discovery lies in the completeness of the exemplars, which also bear the publisher's imprint and date of publication, hitherto unknown: Europe 1677; Africa 1678; Asia 1679; America 1679/1680(?). An undated version of de Wit's world wall map, also published by Longhi, has come to light in the same archive. A copy of the same map, this time published by Giovanni Giacomo de' Rossi in Rome in 1675, was then found in Modena in the Seminario Metropolitano. Comparison of the two copies has provided a date for Longhi's undated issue; Longhi's map came after de' Rossi's, that is after 1675.     

Doctoral Theses in Progress

Abstract

Jean Bonfa's 1696 map offered the most accurate portrait in its day of the Comtat Venaissin. Commissioned when France threatened the region economically and politically, the map's topographical detail and allegorical themes exhibit a political geography favouring papal interests. Yet the map's coordinates for Avignon reflect neither Bonfa's skill as a positional astronomer nor his collaboration with the Paris Observatory. Finally, because local authorities controlled the distribution of Bonfa's map, it was not available to other cartographers.