Catalan Maps and Jewish Books: The Intellectual Profile of Elisha ben Abraham Cresques (1325–1387) by Katrin Kogman-Appel

Abstract

Reviewed by: Catalan Maps and Jewish Books: The Intellectual Profile of Elisha ben Abraham Cresques (1325–1387) by Katrin Kogman-Appel Javier Del Barco Katrin Kogman-Appel. Catalan Maps and Jewish Books: The Intellectual Profile of Elisha ben Abraham Cresques (1325–1387). Terrarum Orbis: History of the Representations of Space in Text and Image, 15. Turnhout: Brepols, 2020. Hardcover, 357 pp. including appendices, tables, and indices + [108] pp. of illustrations and two detached booklets with a complete reproduction of Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS esp. 30 (attributed to Elisha ben Abraham Cresques, Mallorca, ca. 1375). €125. ISBN 978-2-503-58548-2. The title of this book, Catalan Maps and Jewish Books: The Intellectual Profile of Elisha ben Abraham Cresques (1325–1387), is a precise description of Katrin Kogman-Appel’s three objects of study: a Catalan-Aragonese map (the so-called Catalan Atlas, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS esp. 30), which Kogman-Appel prefers to call the Ecumene chart; a Jewish book, the famous Farhi Codex, MS 368 in the Sassoon Collection, containing the Hebrew Bible and a selection of grammatical, rabbinical, exegetical, historiographical, and even calendrical texts; and the Mallorcan Jewish scholar Elisha ben Abraham Bevenisti Cresques (1325–87), who is credited with authorship of the map, and who compiled and copied the materials that make up the Farhi Codex. Kogman-Appel offers us a fascinating journey [End Page 396] through Elisha Cresques’s life and the contents of both the map and the Farhi Codex. She provides a thorough reconstruction of Cresques’s cultural, political, and religious universe in order to understand the reasons why each of these artifacts was produced and the multiple ways in which they signify. The book consists of an introduction, eight chapters, and an epilogue. Special mention must be made of the abundant and magnificent images that help us to visualize the narrative and that force us to move back and forth between the text and the images that correspond to it. Moreover, the book is accompanied by two booklets that contain the reproduction of the twelve sheets into which Cresques’s Ecumene chart is currently divided. In chapter 1, Kogman-Appel sets forth a panoramic view of her study’s contents and organization, touching briefly on the central issues that will be addressed in the following chapters. She also offers a detailed argument for Elisha Cresques as the author of the Ecumene chart, comparing it to other maps also attributed, rightly or wrongly, to Cresques and establishing both the corpus of maps and their approximate chronology. In chapter 2 we find a meticulous analysis of the contents of the Farhi Codex, as well as an exhaustive list of the possible sources Cresques may have consulted for the non-biblical texts included in the codex, both in Mallorca (in Lleó Judà Mosconi’s library) and at the court of Pedro IV of Aragon, or through his contacts with other communities in North Africa. Kogman-Appel has written before about the Farhi Codex, for example, in “The Scholarly Interests of a Scribe and Mapmaker in Fourteenth-Century Majorca: Elisha ben Abraham Bevenisti Cresques’s Bookcase” (in The Hebrew Book in the Western Mediterranean: Late Medieval Hebrew Manuscripts and Incunabula in Context, ed. Javier del Barco [Leiden: Brill, 2015], 148–81). However, in Catalan Maps and Jewish Books, she connects the intellectual interests that Cresques demonstrates in the Farhi Codex to the Ecumene chart in a more explicit and articulated way. By the same token, in chapter 3 we find a precise exposition of the Ecumene chart and its multiple readings, ranging from those related to the patron’s expectations of the work, to more personal ones connected with Cresques’s own cultural and religious interests. Chapters 4 to 8 focus on different aspects of reading and analyzing the Ecumene chart related to representations of political space, of Islam and the [End Page 397] Islamic world, of the territories controlled by the Mongols, and of mythical and imagined spaces. They also deal with the possible sources used by Cresques for the Ecumene chart, and how these were understood and modeled according to his different interests. Kogman-Appel uses the...