Maps of Paradise, by Alessandro Scafi

Abstract

Maps of Paradise, by Alessandro Scafi. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2013. 176 pp. $40.00 US (cloth). Imagining perfect happiness at some past or future time, and/or in some remote place, we are reminded, is a shared human need, one consistently tinged with a sense of mourning for the inaccessibility of heaven in this life and the apparently fallen condition of our world (p. 8). Though nearly all cultures embrace a concept of paradise, comparatively few insist upon its cartographic location. In his excellent Maps of Paradise, Alessandro Scafi confronts one such exceptional trajectory, critically examining the preoccupation of Christian theologians and image makers from late antiquity to the enlightenment with situating the Garden of Eden upon the terrestrial globe. Readers are introduced to these maps through over one hundred superb colour illustrations, acquiring in the process a palpable longing for the gorgeous paradises described by medieval illuminators and early printmakers alike. Chapter one: Paradise Nowhere and Everywhere surveys the prevalence and variety of paradisiacal ideologies across cultures, moving succinctly from the ancient Near East, to early Islam, to the atheistic utopia of John Lennon's Imagine. Most usefully, in presenting a diversity of views, Scafi underscores the distinctiveness of the (largely Latin) Christian tradition that lies at this book's core. Chapter two: Mapping the Territory provides a necessarily brief overview of the range of maps produced by Christians over nearly two millennia. The fifteenth-century Venetian world map of Giovanni Leardo serves as a fascinating example of the seeming paradox of locating Eden on an ostensibly modern image of the earth. The visually stunning mappae mundi of the twelfth through fourteenth centuries form the core of Scafi's third and fourth chapters and, in many ways, constitute the heart of this study. Chapter three: Mapping the Bible unpacks the relationship between terrestrial maps and sacred text, exploring how scripture and image intersected to envision the medieval globe. One of the most distinctive features of these maps is their imposition of historical events onto the framework of territorial reality. The fourth chapter, Mapping Time examines this conflation of space and time, focusing especially on the unique narrative structure by which biblical history proceeds from East to West across the surface of medieval maps. Readers thus acquire a feel for the textures and contours of a distinctive geography often at odds with expectations. Indeed, one of the strengths of this book is its clear, at times elegant, elucidation of the historical situation from which medieval maps emerged. The history of cartography, once preoccupied with evaluations of facticity and beholden to narratives of progress, becomes, in Scafi's hands, a vital tool for unearthing the cultural and intellectual patterns of the past. Chapter five: Where is Nowhere? explores the ways in which the increasingly precise cartographic modes of early Europeans encroached upon and increasingly marginalized Eden's terrestrial location. …