Literary Mapping in German-Speaking Europe

Early modern maps were surrounded by and interspersed with texts of many kinds. The intimate relationship between cartographic image and geographical text in the map was due to the map’s mixed media structure and its early appearance in the context of history books, travel reports, or chorographic descriptions. Literature was based on other types of text. Epic, drama, and poetry were essentially written forms; yet they, too, were surrounded by and interspersed with numerous images. Up to the fifteenth century, direct points of contact between the spheres of geography and literature were rare. But there was a common denominator that cartography and literature shared, namely, the idea of a Christian world. Literature has never meant only the production of texts, as cartography does not mean simply the production of prints. Both deal with conceptions of reality. The predominant concept in early modern times was that of the Christian world.1 The ongoing process of differentiation, however, made it more and more difficult to bring divergent forms of perception, such as the religious, the scientific, and the artistic, into line. Mutual attraction between cartography and literature gave rise to a new genre, the literary map, which could be either graphic or textual. Although the geographical map was concerned with the earth’s surface, the literary map used techniques of cartographic representation to depict religious, political, social, moral, and psychological facts or states other than the geographical. During the sixteenth century, the fascination with cartography grew steadily and reached the literary world in several waves. At first, the map infiltrated aphorisms and metaphorical speech. Authors later went on to structure their literary works after the model of cartography and to write their own maps. Early modern cartography also faced considerable skepticism, a frequent reaction to any new and powerful device and therefore a measure of its success. This explains the general trend in seeing the map not so much as a tool for enhanced orientation, but as the symbol of a mazelike world. As a whole, the years between 1470 and 1650 were the formative period of literary cartography. It was at this time that the prototypes of the fictitious, the satirical, and the allegorical map were created. Yet there still was no continuous production of literary maps that would allow the drafting of an elegant typology. At the fringe of contemporary image making and still small in number, these maps achieved their full significance only in the light of further developments at the end of the seventeenth century.2