Globalism and Tolerance in Early Modern Geography

Abstract

Geography's voice within the debates on cosmopolitan citizenship initiated by Martha Nussbaum's 1994 restatement of Stoic cosmopolitanism has been strangely muted, especially given the significance of spatiality and cultural specificity within recent geographical theory. David Harvey's (2000) contribution is an exception, but while his argument that geographical education should be propaedeutic to cosmopolitanism is politically powerful and timely, his presentation of it begs some historical questions. The principal ones concern his neglect of the neo-Stoic tradition in Renaissance geography and his narrow embrace of geography as a political project. This article addresses these issues through an examination of Abraham Ortelius's Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570), a distinctly Renaissance cosmographic project of representing the world's unity and diversity. The work is placed in the context of sixteenth-century neo-Stoicism, humanist rhetoric, and the metaphor of the world theater as a moral space. Knowledge of the world theater involves various forms of “distanciation,” promoting a quest for wisdom and tolerance of difference. Such geography is primarily a moral project that emphasizes the poetics as much as the politics of reason and understanding. Philosophical ideas and practices relating to global knowledge and vision, molded in the context of the early Roman empire, were reworked in the early years of European (especially Iberian) oceanic empire, and also in the context of religious intolerance within Europe itself. The article argues that geography's own contributions to cosmopolitanism are deeper and more complex than a reading confined to post-Enlightenment disciplinary geography would suggest.

Key Words:

• atlas
• cosmography
• cosmopolitanism
• Ortelius
• renaissance geography

Notes

1. The geographical thinkers on space and place who have been most influential outside the discipline include David Harvey, Edward Soja, Doreen Massey, and Nigel Thrift. Their works are widely cited by scholars adopting interpretative and critical approaches in such fields as anthropology, sociology, archaeology, and cultural, literary, and performing-arts studies. Robert D. Sack and Yi-Fu Tuan are also cited regularly outside the discipline. For an example of geography's renewed appeal in the humanities, see Marino (2002).

2. The sources for these claims are too numerous and too fami-liar to merit detailed listing here. The most thorough critical survey of postcolonial thought within geography is Derek Gregory's Geographical Imaginations (1994). For a sympathetic discussion of the reassertion of geography's centrality in the social sciences and humanities, see Marino (2002,; 23), who points out that “[G]eography has always been extremely receptive to new ideas in exchange with both the natural and human sciences, but relatively weak in retaining its own identity as other sciences sack, assimilate, and annex it.” The most recent bout of geography's periodic crisis of confidence is to be found in the recent pages of this journal (Turner 2002).

3. For a summary of debates within cultural geography, see Foote, Hugill, and Mathewson (1995,; 9–26). On “critical humanist geography,” see Adams, Hoelscher, and Till (2001).

4. Entrikin (2001,; 437–38) makes a brief connection between Tuan's and Nussbaum's work in his postscript to Adams, Hoelscher, and Till's book. See also Entrikin (1999, 2002).

5. Thus, the depiction of a large part of the earth's surface could be “chorographic” in respect of a planisphere showing the whole ecumene, while the description of a small region of Germany could be termed, as Albrecht Dürer recognized, a “cosmography.” Whatever consistency of usage existed depended in part on the work's relation to others in the same series and in part to the application of mathematical or artistic techniques (Apian 1524; Ruscelli 1561).

6. I use the term “scientific” in this paragraph to denote the West's nineteenth-century framing of the social world and its relations with non-European peoples through a positivist and deductive model derived from statistics and the sciences of nature.

7. Bound collections of printed maps predated Ortelius's project, but he was the first to organize such a collection systematically and to seek to provide a consistent style of presentation. Part of the success of the Theatrum was due to Ortelius's commercial acumen.

8. For the sake of convenience, I shall refer here mainly to the English edition of the Theatrum, published thirty-six years after the first Latin volume, which appeared in Antwerp in 1570. For a summary bibliography, see Koeman (1964).

9. The Typus was used as the base map for cartographic projects throughout the succeeding century—for example, by the Jesuit, Athansius Kircher, for a map of the postdiluvial world in his Mundus Subterranaeus and by Paolo Ricci for his world map with Chinese characters.

10. “Parergon” is a term originating in painting, meaning an addition to the main subject or work. It carries the meaning of a decoration or embellishment. Ortelius's usage emphasizes the visual, artistic aspect of his project.

11. In the same decade as Ortelius's work appeared, Philip II commissioned three great scientific and pictorial projects: Antonio della Spina's townscape paintings of every town in Spain; the Relaziones topograficos, detailing the history and ethnography of Spanish colonial settlements; and Hernandez' illustrated botanical and medical history of the New World. Overtaken by preparations for the Armada against England and the revolt of the Netherlands, these works were archived in the Escorial.

12. History's other eye was chronology.

13. On Ortelius's use of the metaphor, see Mangani (1998a). I have relied on Mangani's stimulating study for much of my understanding of Ortelius's cultural context.

14. Yates (1966) first drew attention to the significance of the classical memory theater in the sixteenth century. A considerable literature has developed since then, expanding and revising her thesis.

15. On the significance of these terms for determining the role of geography in medieval scholarship, see Lozovsky (2000,; 11).

16. This was done most famously by Bramante in a fresco painted ca. 1480 for a studiolo in Milan, now at the Brera Gallery. Bramante drew upon cartographer Francesco Rosselli's planisphere, showing the latest knowledge of the West African coastline.

17. These two classical philosophical schools cannot be summarized without doing violence to the complexity and variety of their thought. For the purposes of this article, a key distinc-tion lies in the Stoic commitment to an ordered and harmo-nious cosmos, as opposed to the Epicurean belief in a random and contingent world, devoid of signs of creative intelligence, to which the appropriate human response is to minimize suffering and to maximize pleasure. Renaissance readings of the two philosophies often merged elements of each.

18. On the role of geography and landscape in Virgil's nationalism, see Jenkyns (1998).

19. This aspect of Renaissance science is fundamentally at odds with Humboldtian science, the characteristic commitment of which is to instrumentation and measure as the guarantor of scientific claims.

20. For a detailed and contextual discussion of the tapestry and image, see Brotton (1997,; 17–23).

21. Martianus Capella's text reads as follows:

 Thus beautifully decked out in these garments they [Jupiter and Juno] looked at a certain sphere carved with multifarious complexity which was placed before their seat on a starry platform. This was formed of all the elements in such a fashion that nothing was absent of all that which is thought to be included in nature as a whole. All of the aether was there, the lower air, the seas, the diverse areas of the earth, and the gulfs of Tartarus, as well as cities, crossroads, and the whole line-up of living things to be counted as much in species as in genera. The sphere appeared to be the very image and Plato-nic Form of the universe. And in this orb shone forth, in the mirror of the metamorphosizing Apollo, what each and every people of all nations got up to in its daily activities. There Jupiter directed with his own hand who he wished to rise, who to sink, who to be born, who to die. The arbitrary Maker showed no consistency about which part of the earth he wished to destroy, which to bless, and which to lay waste, and which to make populous. (quoted in Nicolopulos 2000,; 208)

22. Hulme (1986) discusses the role of the Atlantic as a modern Mediterranean in the imaginative geography of sixteenth-century European encounter.

23. Fuchs's (2001) important study of the passages on Fitón's cave makes the important point that Ercilla is decidedly ambiguous about the actualities of empire. Fitón, after all, is a native American—an Araucanian—and thus of a people who resisted Spanish invasion very effectively over a long period. Thus, “The competing discourse of ethnography and the pressures of contemporary empire-building undermine literary verities with first-hand knowledge of different peoples…[P]oetic authority in the service of empire is compromised by the personal experience of empire-building” (Fuchs 2001 48–49). See also Quint (1993).

24. The classical source for this reference is the poetry of Lucan (Nicolopulos 2000,; 123–24).

25. These epigrams read as follows:

 Top left: “For man was given life that he might inhabit that sphere called Earth, which you see in the center of this temple.” (Cicero)

 Bottom left: “The purpose of the horse is for riding, of the ox for plowing, of the dog for hunting and keeping guard; the purpose of man alone is contemplating the world.” (Cicero)

 Bottom right: “I desire only that philosophy should appear before us in all her unity, just as the whole breadth of the firmament is spread before us to gaze upon.” (Seneca)

 Top right: “Is this that pinpoint which is divided by sword and fire among so many nations? How ridiculous are the boundaries of mortals!” (Seneca)

26. This motto appears on the emblem of Philip II of Spain and later in seventeenth-century Jesuit emblem books. It can be read as a hubristic statement of universal empire, and the ambiguity of global authority and personal humility is quite in keeping with the philosophical tradition I am tracing here.

27. The Jesuit Order adopted many Familist ideas, along with its fascination with emblems and the iconography of the Sacred Heart. See Cosgrove (2001,; 159–65).

28. Botero explains Europe's urban development with reference to an environmentalist thesis. Discussion of the connections between the cosmographic belief in elemental sympathies and zonal climatic influences, on the one hand, and ethnographic difference, on the other, is beyond the scope of this article. But to call it “outright racist” (Marino 2002,; 16) seems anachronistic.

29. On the significance in these years of autopsy—seeing for oneself—as the foundation of secure knowledge, see Sawday (1997,; 29–48).

30. Significantly, van Loon's vast output of popular writings includes a study of Erasmus and a work entitled Tolerance.