Mapping Maritime Triumph and the Enchantment of Empire: Portuguese Literature of the Renaissance

461 When the Jesuit António Vieira composed his sermons and visionary tracts in the middle of the seventeenth century, maps great and small emanated like puffs of smoke from his fiery prose. The world was ablaze—or might eventually catch fire if Vieira’s audience did not heed his prophetic warnings—and the map was fodder for the terrestrial conflagration, a tool that could encompass and describe the shape of things to come but would ultimately perish in the apocalyptic flames. There would come a day when “the world [would be] in embers,” Vieira wrote in his “Sermão da primeira dominga do Advento” (1650), and when “nothing can be seen upon this beautiful and extended map but ashes, relics of [the world’s] grandeur, and proof of our vanity.”1 In his História do futuro, Vieira used cartographic imagery as the central allegory for a new kind of historical writing: a prophetic and millenarian vision in the form of a “prodigious map” that extended from the present into the future, ending with the end of the world. The terrestrial globe—and its representation—became a central feature of Vieira’s project, in which the upper hemisphere represented the past, the lower hemisphere the future, and the “middle of each hemisphere . . . the horizons of time . . . from which point . . . we will go to discover new regions and new inhabitants.”2 But in the very same text, Vieira employed cartographic metaphors to describe the science of chiromancy and the topography of the human hand: “In such a small map, as flat and smooth as the palm of a human hand, the chiromancers not only invented distinct lines and characters, but raised and divided mountains as well.”3 For Vieira, then, the map could shrink from a temporal atlas stretching to infinity to a palm-sized chorography. The flexible scale of the cartographic image allowed the metaphor to expand or contract depending on the needs of the rhetorical moment, while the map’s material adaptability—from human skin to burning embers—gave the orator a limitless range of figurative gestures to mold and maneuver. It should come as no surprise that literary images and linguistic devices with cartographic overtones were in circulation in Vieira’s day among missionaries and merchants throughout the lusophone world. Vieira inherited much of his geographical vocabulary from language developed at a time when the use of the map was anything but figurative—a time when the voyages of maritime discovery depended inordinately on maps and charts, fueling the imagination of chroniclers and dramaturges, cosmographers and illustrators, poets and their patrons. Influenced by the force of these images and affected by his own experiences on both sides of the Atlantic, Vieira wielded maps and cartographic metaphors as a rhetorical scepter to advance his own proselytic aims. Vieira’s sermons allow us to reflect more broadly on the ties between cartography and culture in the early modern period, which, in this case in particular, draw their roots from the literature of the Portuguese Renaissance. In his writings Vieira evokes maps of all kinds: material charts that allowed Portuguese pilots to sail successfully around distant capes and across unknown seas, cultural maps that reflected biblical readings in an increasingly empirical age, and corporeal maps that conflated macroand microcosmic visions through readings of the human body. A man of both words and actions, Vieira constructed a baroque discourse around ideas that were drawn from an age that had redefined astronomical, geographical, and pictorial space, raising doubts about the size and scale of the world and the human place in it. The literature of that age reflected an increasing confidence in the human ability to observe, chart, and transform the natural world, but also came to exude a deep uneasiness about the limits of these achievements. This tension between confidence and uncertainty, between triumphalism and despair—due at least in part to the disruption of known geographic, scientific, and philosophical boundaries—found a figurative resonance in the supple, even inflammable image of the map: an imago mundi still capable of being manipulated and transformed to suit the cultural exigencies of an expanding world. Renaissance literature acknowledged Portugal largely through its extensive colonial enterprise on land and at sea, a presence confirmed through its colorful cartogra-