Book Review: Ptolemy's Geography in the West: La Géographie de Ptolémée en Occident (IVe—XVIe siècle)

Abstract

PTOLEMY'S GEOGRAPHY IN THE WEST La Geographie de Ptolemee en Occident (IVe-XVIe siecle). Patrick Gautier Dalche (Brepols, Turnhout, 2009). Pp. 442. euro95. ISBN 978-2-503-53164-9.Patrick Gautier Dalche, director of research in the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and director of studies at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Historical and Philological Sciences, is an historian well known for his work on representations of space from late Antiquity to the sixteenth century.La Geographie de Ptolemee en Occident consists of four parts of unequal length, three of which reprise and enrich earlier studies, especially the last. We encounter successively a very general introduction to Ptolemy's Geography; a (previously unpublished) study of the reception of this work from late Antiquity to the Byzantine world between the fourth and the thirteenth centuries; an inquiry, expanding earlier work, on the presence of the Geography in the Latin world between the seventh and the fourteenth century; finally, occupying more than half the book, three long chapters devoted to the reception in Europe of the Latin translation of the Geography between the end of the fourteenth century and the first third of the sixteenth, a substantial reworking of a preliminary effort of about a hundred pages that appeared in English under the title 'The reception of Ptolemy's Geography (end of the fourteenth to beginning of the sixteenth century) in vol. iii/1 of The history of cartography, edited by D. Woodward (2007).In his preface, Gautier Dalche mentions, in order to reject them, certain received ideas, viz, that Ptolemy's Geography and Mathematical syntaxis constitute the quintessence of Greek science, in opposition to Roman empiricism and to the symbolism of the medieval mind. Concerning the last point, the author insists on the fact that a medieval mode of spatial perception of space has never been demonstrated, a stereotype still spread from the pens of authors who are prisoners of the myth of a rupture introduced in the West by the rediscovery of the Geography in the Renaissance, by the appearance of a modern space ruled into quadrilaterals with meridians and parallels. Indeed, the contents of this work, the first complete manuscripts of which date from the thirteenth century, were known more or less directly since late Antiquity (Pappus, Theon of Alexandria, Ammianus Marcelinus) and in the Byzantine world starting from the sixth century, but also, almost without discontinuity, among the Latins starting from the high Middle Ages (Cassiodorus) and up to the fourteenth century (Paolo dell'Abbaco). As for the notion of geographical coordinates, it was applied from the eleventh century and appears in Roger Bacon's work, which would suffice to relativize the myth of a Ptolemaic revolution in geography that supposedly occurred starting in the fifteenth century.This stance illustrates the spirit in which this work has been composed. For the author, it is not a question of history of geography in the proper sense, nor of history of cartography, but of intellectual and cultural history, one of whose objectives (fully attained) is to demolish certain stereotypes that have been produced by an essentialist conception of historiographical categories.Such an approach, faithful in spirit to the path opened by Eugenio Garin in his studies on the Renaissance, proves particularly fruitful in the last part of the book - the newest and the richest - devoted to the three successive phases that, according to the author, characterize the appropriation of the Geography in the West starting from the Latin translation of Jacopo Angeli. …