[Discussion] European Mapping and Modernity

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

David Buisseret. The Mapmaker's Quest: Depicting New Worlds in
Renaissance Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. xxi + 227 pp.
Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN
0-19-210053-X.
*Reviewed by:* Denis Cosgrove, Department of Geography, University of
California Los Angeles.
*Published by:* H-HistGeog <http://www.h-net.msu.edu/%7Ehistgeog/>
(November, 2004)

European Mapping and Modernity

Map making, map use and map consciousness are at once agents of
modernity and among its most characteristic products. David Buisseret
does not make this claim explicitly, but his book demonstrates its truth
with unusual clarity of narrative and illustrates it through a masterly
selection of examples. The book's emphasis is European mapping between
1400 and 1800, although there are forays into nineteenth-,
twentieth-century and even contemporary mapping examples and questions.
This flexibility makes the appearance of the term "Renaissance" in the
book's subtitle somewhat misleading, and accounts for my own use of
"modernity." For while Buisseret's focus and expertise undoubtedly lie
in the years between 1500 and 1650, the book is not governed by any
particular strain of Renaissance historiography and its principal import
is the central and continuing role that the mapping impulse has played
in constructing and representing Western modernity.

In fact, Buisseret's opening question is why Europeans began to make and
use maps with such accelerated intensity and in so many areas of daily
life from the early years of the fifteenth century, and why this has
continued up to the present, overwhelming the various other cartographic
traditions that we now recognize from China, South Asia and the Islamic
world, for example, to become the cartographic language of the world.
While he recognizes the significance of traditional explanations for the
mapping revolution: the "rediscovery" of Ptolemy's technical writings on
coordinate systems and projection, a secular humanist interest in the
material world, oceanic navigation, and the demands of warfare, taxation
and administrative bureaucracy emerging from new territorial scales and
arrangements, for example, he demonstrates that in many respects
Europe's furor cartographicus predated these historical processes and
events, and indeed that they depended in large measure upon maps and map
skills.

The book is structured by these various realms of social life in which
the European map operated. Its opening chapters deal authoritatively
with influences, legacies and differences from medieval and classical
mapping and cartographic knowledge. The body of the work however is the
four chapters dealing respectively with the interest in cartography
displayed by Europe's ruling elites as they sought better to know,
defend and administer their territories (a principal subject of the
author's previous work), the role of mapping in European mercantile and
territorial expansion overseas, mapping's close attachment to warfare as
its practice was transformed by artillery, and the relations between
cartography and changing economic relations in town and country. In each
of these studies, Buisseret offers sensible arguments and plausible
explanations. These are governed by a commonsense understanding of maps
as complex social products with more than merely instrumental value, an
understanding based on intensive study and characterized by generous
acknowledgement of sources.

Perhaps the most pleasing feature of the book is Buisseret's selection
of images to illustrate his arguments. There are 83 figures and twelve
beautifully reproduced color plates. While some of these will be
familiar to most historians of cartography (although the author
frequently presents them in a novel light), many will be new. They
reflect Buisseret's command of the source materials and they are
accompanied by informative text inserts that allow them to be consulted
as a parallel narrative to the written argument.

The text itself is written with the clarity of great knowledge carried
lightly. Buisseret's book should appeal to readers well beyond the
confined fields of Renaissance and cartographic studies. Scholars in
those fields may be slightly disappointed that, rather than wrestling in
his conclusion with the historical question with which he opens, the
author is content to offer some rather random comments on garden, city
and national maps, on maps and science, maps and flight, and on
satellite mapping. By comparison with the elegance and depth displayed
in the body of the book, such a concluding chapter cannot help but
appear superficial. This should not however discourage readers from
enjoying a masterly and beautifully produced book.



Citation: Denis Cosgrove. "Review of David Buisseret, The Mapmaker's
Quest: Depicting New Worlds in Renaissance Europe," H-HistGeog , H-Net
Reviews, November, 2004. URL:
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=296331101229566.