Geographical, Cartographical and Cosmographical Echoes in Teofilo Folengo’s Baldus (1517)

Abstract

While exploring Teofilo Folengo’s Baldus (Venice, 1517) my paper draws on the Lipsian view that the practice of reading and travelling during the Renaissance were closely interwoven. In the same way the traveler walks through strange and foreign landscapes, the movement of the reader’s eye explores the text as it slowly merges into a map. In the present paper, I will first examine how Folengo uses cartographic metaphors and conventions in his Liber Macaronicus, to create a world in which geographical reality and fiction are meshed. I will then try to uncover the textual sources which are embedded in this palimpsestic work. Like the Renaissance cartographers and cosmographers (Münster, Mercator, Ortelius and Cuningham), Folengo draws on various ancient sources (Homer’s Odysseus, Lucian’s A True Story and Charron: or, A Survey of the Follies of Mankind, Julius Solinus’s Polyhistor and Navigatio Sancti Brendani) as well as on contemporary geographical knowledge. Finally, I will seek to show how the text hinges on the speculum motif as it questions social, political and religious issues in early modern Italy.