Printing a Mediterranean World: Florence, Constantinople, and the Renaissance of Geography, by Sean Roberts

Abstract

Printing Mediterranean World: Florence, Constantinople, and the Renaissance of Geography, by Sean Roberts. I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2013. xiii, 293 pp. $49.95 US (cloth). Renaissance geographies were not straightforward books. Descriptions of the known world in text and image, they embraced geography and history, described the contents of the natural world and the designs of men, constituting vast warehouse of knowledge, which might be shaped and then shared for many purposes. Some such works embodied the aspirations of empire, others were essentially pious in their architecture: the 1482 Septe giornate della geographia of Francesco Berlinghieri gave expression to Classical Antiquity consciously reanimated by Florentine humanism, and sought to form intellectual communities through the conventions of patronage and practice of diplomatic gift-giving. In his Printing Mediterranean World, Sean Roberts explores Berlinghieri's Geographia in great detail, attending to both the work's content and its materiality: both were extraordinary. The text of the Geographia was verse reimagining of Ptolemy's second-century text, written in the Tuscan vernacular, which described the journey of its author around the known world in seven days, guided by Ptolemy, as Dante had been by Virgil. No less remarkable were the thirty-one engraved double-folio maps which accompanied Berlinghieri's text, or the degree of craftsmanship involved in the customization of copies for individual recipients: it was, Roberts tells us, among the most ambitious printing projects of the fifteenth century. The analysis of the Geographia divided into four chapters. Roberts considers first the fifteenth century's fascination with Ptolemy's text, which had been lost to the Christian West throughout the Middle Ages. He considers the significance of Ptolemy's Geographia for Florentine humanism, but also the extent to which this interest provided point of intellectual contact between Christian Italy and the Islamic Ottoman court. This diplomatic connection between Berlinghieri's Florence and the princes Bayezid and Cem subject revisited throughout this book: they had been sent copies of the Geographia as carefully-crafted diplomatic gifts. Why choose this book, of all the opulent material goods available to the city of Florence? Why printed, rather than manuscript copies? Roberts shows that the Renaissance was transnational in that the scholars of Italy and the Levant drew upon shared classical heritage. The second chapter's discussion of the nature of fifteenth-century geography and the status of the geographer considers discipline which strove to reanimate ancient authorities, to glory in living past, rather than one recognizable as the embryo of modem scientific geography. Berlinghieri's text draws upon the places, myths, events, flora and fauna of vivid classical and medieval canon; it sought to fashion a living geography on the ancient model--a poem about the world not just as it was, but as it is (p. 64). Renaissance geography should not be compared to the modem mathematics of physical space, but understood as complex tapestry of values and meaning woven from all knowledge, ancient and modem, by the geographer. The relationship of manuscript and print, chaotic push and pull rather than an orderly succession, considered in the third chapter. …