Early Modern Literature and Cartography: An Overview

401 In the past two decades, early modern studies have witnessed sudden and dramatic development in areas in which cartography and literature overlap and inform each other. Maps have traditionally been used to sustain and illustrate the study of history, but now literary critics are studying them in order to detect how they mix observation and fantasy, elements vital to poetry and fiction and to representation in general. Researchers, especially the eight authors of the contributions in this section of the volume, recognize how printed maps informed the creation of poetry and fiction in the early modern era. They see, too, how maps are subject to theoretical speculation and so, as a result, can be studied with apparatus deployed in the critical treatment of literature. If indeed early modern literature—a complex body of texts built from manuscripts, from printed forms, and from woodcut and copperplate illustration—can be understood to be a mixed medium, it follows that maps inspire literary creation. Concomitantly, because the boundaries between maps and writing are fluid, a map sometimes even qualifies as a work of literature. Much in the way early modern writing drew inspiration from classical and medieval sources, maps of the same period had sources and variants of diverse origin. Both maps and text belong to traditions of graphic rhetoric inherited from the age of the manuscript and print culture in its early phases. Close analysis tends to show how maps betray ideology—defined here as an imaginary representation of social processes—in ways often identical to those of literature. When literature and cartography are treated together over the span of 170 years, from roughly 1470 to 1640, they reveal common traits that cry out for closer comparative inspection. The authors of this section have shown exactly where, in six very different nations, cartography and literature were densely interwoven. They write of the ways that literature was directly influenced by mapping and note that, from the birth of the incunabulum up to the age of the Baroque, there was a shift from cosmographic representations of the world to topographic or monadic counterparts. They draw attention to the importance of the emergence of the isolario, in which, in literature as in cartography, the world is appreciated for its diversity and taken to be an aggregate of singularities. They also take note of a muted expression of melancholy, which shares traits with the tenor of what literary historians call the “Baroque” sensibility, in literature written during the time when the atlas was taking shape. They all account for a common ground of allegory in which the theatrum mundi, or “world-theater,” became a place in which the foibles and fortunes of the history of the world and its inhabitants were played out. In the overview that follows, I should like to draw on their conclusions in order to identify some of the broadly converging lines of early modern literature and cartography.