Early Modern Europeans Research Articles

The First Genocide: Carthage, 146 BC

The Carthaginian delegates were accorded no right of reply. Rome soon began a three-year siege of the world's wealthiest city.4 Of a population of 2-400,000,5 at least 150,000 Carthaginians perished. Appian described one battle in which ‘70,000, including non-combatants’ were killed, probably an exaggeration. But Polybius, who participated in the campaign, confirmed that ‘the number of deaths was incredibly large’ and the Carthaginians ‘utterly exterminated’.6 In 146, Roman legions under Scipio Aemilianus, Cato's ally and brother-in-law of his son, razed the city, and dispersed into slavery the 55,000 survivors, including 25,000 women. Plutarch concluded: ‘The annihilation of Carthage … was primarily due to the advice and counsel of Cato’.7

Holy Day, Holiday: The American Sunday (review)

Reviewed by: The Protestant Voice in American Pluralism Edwin S. Gaustad The Protestant Voice in American Pluralism. By Martin E. Marty. [George H. Shriver Lecture Series in Religion in American History, No. 2.] (Athens: University of Georgia Press. 2004. Pp. xii, 84. $22.95.) This well-written study of Sunday in the United States provides a fascinating cultural history of rest in America. Historically most Americans have ceased working on Sunday, but as Alexis McCrossen demonstrates, the meaning of this day of rest has been constantly contested by differing groups with conflicting theologies, social visions, and political agendas. This text excels in showing how these battles reflect broader changes in American society from the early nineteenth century to the present. [End Page 572] The first seven chapters of McCrossen's study focus upon evolving public policies concerning Sunday. She probes in depth the efforts of early republican sabbatarians to institutionalize Sunday as the biblically mandated Sabbath, and the countervailing forces that encouraged broader understandings of rest and leisure that supported a wider range of acceptable diversions on Sunday. Subsequent chapters probe the influence of the frontier and of war upon Sunday customs, Sunday in the industrial city, and the impact of consumerism in the late nineteenth century. McCrossen shows how battles over the meaning of Sunday reflected perceived differences "between holy day and holidays, between secular and sacred, between rest and work" (p. 110), but makes it clear that the move away from the once dominant evangelical sabbatarian construction of the Sabbath was never a simple matter of secularization. Nineteenth-century Protestant liberals and Catholic immigrants, for example, advanced theological rationales for broadening the meaning of Sunday. For them, holy day and holiday were not opposed but mutually reinforcing categories. In her final two chapters McCrossen moves from public policy to private experience, probing how shifting patterns of race, class, and gender as well as changes in institutional practices shaped the Sundays of individuals and families. The history of Sunday revolves around "the tremendous struggles for control over time—between parents and children, employers and employees, clerics and co-religionists, politicians and citizens, and many others" (p. 154), and McCrossen tells the story of these struggles in compelling prose. Although McCrossen's book is clearly the best starting point for anyone interested in the history of Sunday in America, she would have done well to explore more fully the way that Americans and early modern Europeans contended over the meaning of rest and the Sabbath before 1800. She notes that Puritans and Anglicans often disputed the proper way of keeping Sunday during the colonial era, and that antebellum evangelicals created a "traditional Puritan Sabbath" that was more myth than reality; yet she chooses to begin her story with nineteenth-century controversies over Sunday mail delivery. The reader is left to wonder what disputes over Sunday emerged from the particular constellation of forces triggered by industrialism and demographic expansion, and what conflicts had more ancient roots? Nonetheless, what McCrossen has done is superb. This book will richly reward students of American religion and culture, gender, and family. Gracefully written and well illustrated, it will also appeal to a broader general audience. Edwin S. Gaustad University of California Riverside (Emeritus) Copyright © 2004 The Catholic University of America Press

Romans in a New World: Classical Models in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America

Numa Pompilius, the alleged second king of Rome, reportedly received from Jupiter a magical seal, a sacred shield in the figure of an eight (the ancile), to protect the city. Eighteenth-century creoles maintained that Mexico, altera Roma, had a pelta (crescent-shaped shield) of its own. Mexico’s sacred talisman was Our Lady of Guadalupe—Domini ancilla, the servant of God—whose miraculous image could be deployed to shield Mexico from the plague. Engraved in Latin in the frontispiece of El escudo de armas de Mexico (1746), this story shows that Iberians and their descendants understood their actions in the New World as both following in the footsteps of Rome and “topping off” Rome. Lupher’s Romans in a New World explores in fascinating detail the politics of these two interwoven themes.Following in the footsteps of classicists such as Sabine MacCormack and David Quint, who have turned their considerable linguistic skills toward the study of early modern Iberian sources in the New World, Lupher offers a thoroughly fresh and surprising reading of familiar authors (Bernal Díaz, Francisco Vitoria, Las Casas, Sepúlveda, Oviedo, Garcilaso de la Vega, and Alonso de Ercilla). He achieves this by pairing these known authors with many others who wrote in Latin and whose works “Latin” Americanists seldom read (Miguel de Ulzurrún, Antonio de Guevara, Domingo de Soto, Miguel de Arcos, Vinko Paletin de Korçula, Ambrosio de Morales, Flavio Biondo, Wolfang Lazius, Polydore Vergil, and Guillaume du Choul). The result is a learned treatise on how ancient Rome became a model against which conquistadors compared their exploits, jurists and theologians weighed imperial claims to sovereignty, missionaries evaluated the piety and intelligence of their Amerindian charges, and intellectuals assessed the very nature of “Spanish” identity.Lupher first sets out to explore how Rome became the standard against which soldiers and writers measured their feats in the New World. Conquistadors repeatedly found Julius and Augustus Caesar wanting: petty, insignificant conquerors in a small corner of the world. Poets ridiculed Aeneas as a small hero whose adventures and ordeals had been put to shame by the new Iberian Argonauts. Naturalists dismissed Pliny as a provincial cataloguer of curiosities. And settlers presented the Roman conquest of Jerusalem as prefiguring the fall of Tenochtitlán. Lupher then revisits the debates over the rights of Spain in the New World. Building and improving on the account offered by Anthony Pagden, Lupher shows that the Roman model helped all parties to bolster their arguments. Those who believed Spain had the right to occupy the new lands and dispossess the natives argued that Spain, particularly under Charles V, was the rightful heir to Rome and therefore entitled to be “ruler of all the world”—for even the Bible and the writings of such worthies as St. Augustine had long acknowledged as providential the justice of this Roman title. And some jurists and theologians argued that Spain, like Rome in the past, had gained the right to conquered lands by helping allies fend off enemy attacks (for example, Cortés helping the Tlaxcalans defeat the Aztecs). Finally, writers such as Sepúlveda maintained that Spain, like Rome, had embarked on a civilizing mission, one in which all barbarians were natural slaves to a culturally superior master.Critics of these specious arguments, however, portrayed Rome as an evil cultural and religious force. Lupher shows, for example, that Las Casas’s anthropology was driven by the need to refute Sepúlveda’s humanist infatuation with Rome. Las Casas’s project of “comparative ethnology” sought to invert Sepúlveda’s model by casting the Romans as primitive, credulous, bloody barbarians and the natives as their cultural superiors: more pious and more civilized than the Romans and therefore entitled to their own rulers and lands. To write this sweeping critique of Rome at the height of the Renaissance was no mean feat, for Las Casas had to scour obscure classical sources and antiquarian treatises for evidence of extravagant and absurd Roman behaviors. Lupher shows that the debate over Roman precedent as a foundation for Spain’s New World empire sparked a new genre that sought to draw analogies between the plight of the natives in the Indies and that of “Spaniards” under Roman rule in Iberia. Those sympathetic to the Amerindians looked for ways to make home audiences understand the absurdity of Spanish claims to rightful possession in the New World, and they turned to Numantia for inspiration. These writers showed the brutality of Rome’s Iberian occupation and profoundly altered narratives on the origins of the “Spanish” nation.Lupher demonstrates that, although classical paradigms helped early modern Europeans accommodate and make sense of their New World experience, this experience itself acted as catalyst that radically transformed how Europeans remembered their own classical and local pasts. This book, therefore, calls into question John H. Elliott’s decades-old thesis on the “blunted” impact of the New World in early modern European consciousness.

Neanderthal taxonomy reconsidered: implications of 3D primate models of intra- and interspecific differences.

The taxonomic status of Neanderthals lies at the center of the modern human origins debate. Proponents of the single-origin model often view this group as a distinct species with little or no contribution to the evolution of modern humans. Adherents to the regional continuity model consider Neanderthals a subspecies or population of Homo sapiens, which contributed significantly to the evolution of early modern Europeans. Paleontologists generally agree that fossil species should be equivalent to extant ones in the amount of their morphological variation. Recognition of fossil species therefore hinges on analogy to living species. A previous study by one of the authors and recent work by other researchers [Schillachi, M. A. & Froelich, J. W. (2001) Am. J. Phys. Anthropol. 115, 157-166] have supported specific status for Neanderthals based on analogy to chimpanzees and Sulawesi macaques, respectively. However, these taxa may not be the most appropriate models for Pleistocene humans. Here we test the hypothesis that Neanderthals represent a subspecies of H. sapiens by comparing the degree of their morphological differentiation from modern humans to that found within and between 12 species of extant primates. The model taxa comprised >1,000 specimens, including phylogenetic (modern humans and African apes) and ecological (eight papionin taxa) models for Pleistocene humans. Morphological distances between model taxon pairs were compared to the distances between Neanderthals and modern humans obtained by using a randomization technique. Results strongly support a specific distinction for Neanderthals.

Mapping and the European Search for Intercultural Alliances in the Colonial World

Mapping and the European Search for Intercultural Alliances in the Colonial World Cynthia J. Van Zandt When Richard Hakluyt the younger published Divers voyages touching the discouerie of America in 1582, he included works written originally for other enterprises. One such tract was a set of instructions sent by the merchants of the Muscovy Company with two of their employees on an expedition to find a northeast passage. Hakluyt thought the Muscovy Company's advice was useful for "other enterprises of discouerie" and appropriate for those who would explore and colonize North America. In their instructions, the Muscovy Company's merchants were very specific about the kinds of goods and behaviors most likely to impress persons of credit whom the expedition might meet. The merchants' list of goods included most commodities important to late sixteenth-century European trade, with emphasis on goods produced in England. However, two of the items the merchants thought were certain to impress seem more surprising. In addition to cloth, shoes, gloves, and English glass, they urged their men to take maps, and the merchants had very clear ideas about which maps would make the best impression. They wanted to send maps that represented the territory, wealth, and market power of the English kingdom. For these merchants, the visual images on maps could be particularly useful in intercultural contacts where pictorial images, material goods, and gesture could be more important than words.1 [End Page 72] Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century maps seem inaccurate to audiences informed by the framework of modern western scientific geography. Yet early modern maps were neither merely stepping stones in an ongoing quest for knowledge, nor were they simply the product of ignorance, however much they differ from current geographical and geopolitical perceptions. Mapping allowed people to imagine geopolitical relationships and aspirations, and they were integrally linked to practical attempts to establish intercultural alliances. Mapmaking, cartographical principles, and related concepts and skills from navigation formed the foundation of early modern Europeans' quest to establish trade and military alliances with native peoples during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Early modern Europeans were particularly fascinated with maps and mapping. They drew secret maps by hand and carefully protected the knowledge of lucrative trade routes and strategic military outposts that such maps represented. Increasingly, changes in navigation, mathematics, and the use of perspective helped to create a rapidly growing European market for maps, and an increasing number and array of maps became readily available in European markets.2 As changes in print and cartographic technologies greatly increased Europeans' familiarity with mapping concepts and navigation techniques, Europeans extended the language and concepts from mapping and navigation [End Page 73] and applied them to political and cultural relationships. When European colonial sponsors and explorers worked to map the earth and its waterways, they sought also to map the peoples and social problems of the world. Early modern Europeans saw mapping and navigation as parts of a larger whole, and both were explicitly connected to colonialism. In this context, maps as well as geography and navigation materials performed a similar function to colonial travel accounts and promotional literature. Indeed, they were complementary materials and were read as such by European readers. One of the purposes of this material was to work out all possible connections between the world's various peoples. Some of the most famous compilers of travel narratives and ethnographic descriptions of new lands and peoples drew out these connections explicitly. The English colonial promoter Richard Hakluyt and the Dutch colonial promoter Johann De Laet, for instance, both sought to pinpoint how different nations were related: religiously, linguistically, culturally, and diplomatically. This too was a kind of mapping, and as part of it, colonial promoters like Hakluyt were explicitly interested in laying out the enemies and allies of new peoples whom Europeans encountered. Alliances were an integral part of the context of mapping in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and vice versa. Moreover, maps themselves often specifically focused on the importance of intercultural alliances by specifying where different peoples lived, who and where their allies and enemies were. This was as true of mapping enterprises in North America as elsewhere. The European colonial ventures...

James S. Amelang, The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. ixx + 497 pp. $60.00 cloth.

Let's begin with the mythological allusion in the title The Flight of Icarus. Its inspiration comes from a translation into Castilian of a seventeenth-century Catalan personal chronicle by a tanner from Barcelona named Miquel Parets. The relevant passage reads as follows: “may this worthy ambition serve as a sun to illuminate my endeavors, rather than to cause me to plummet like Icarus . . . even though destiny assigned me to a lowlier sphere, it did not rob me of the wish to aspire to higher things.” (1, 164) According to Amelang, the Icarus myth was one of many classical models that informed the writing and self-images of early modern Europeans of humble as well as more exalted origins. His interpretation suggests that the anonymous translator (as well as the original author himself) understood artisan writing to be a bold, even transgressive, act that challenged social and cultural boundaries. The Icarus myth, then, in this and related usages, serves as an ambiguous class allegory: either as a morality tale about the just punishment for pride, or as an exhortation to attempt ascent, and delivery from the labyrinth, even in the face of overwhelming odds.

Gender, Male Homosexuality, and Power in Colonial Yucatán

Scholars have been studying the history of homosexuality for two decades, but only rarely have they ventured beyond the study of homosexuality in modern Europe and the United States. In the past several years, others have begun to challenge the Eurocentric biases of these works. One set of issues often overlooked by both Latin American historians and historians of homosexuality in general is the connection between homoeroticism, colonialism, and discourse among the Maya of Yucatan. Examining the colonial years, one can establish a variety of power dynamics at work. The Spaniards asserted their own power in an attempt to create an effective labor force made up primarily of Yucatec Maya (see Patch, 1993), while Maya nobles maintained power over the populations under their control (see Roys, 1943; Quezada, 1993: 125-138; Restall, 1997). I suggest that gender and homosexuality were central to power dynamics in the colonial situation. The few major works on homosexuality in colonial Latin America have focused on the building of community, the berdache in indigenous societies, and the use of discourse (see Sigal, 2002). Historians have found that, in colonial Brazil and Mexico, men found other men who wanted to have sex with them. In urban environments these men engaged in a wide variety of sexual activities and even formed their own subcultures with their own rules of engagement (see Gruzinski, 1985; Mott, 1989). The berdache, a crossdressing Native American figure, has intrigued anthropologists for the past century. While most of the scholarship has related to nineteenth-century North America (see Roscoe, 1998), many academics have assumed that the berdache existed in colonial and preconquest Latin American indigenous societies. Indeed, such a cross-dressing figure does appear to have existed, but his meaning is in dispute (see Trexler, 1995; Horswell, 2002). Early modern Europeans engaged in some discussion of homosexuality, and scholars have begun to analyze this discourse. This article expands on this scholarship by attempting to understand indigenous discourse as well.

FROM TYRANNY TO DESPOTISM: THE ENLIGHTENMENT'S UNENLIGHTENED IMAGE OF THE TURKS

This study aims to examine the way in which European writers of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries represented Ottoman government. The Ottoman Empire had a special place in European experience and thought. The Ottomans were geographically close to Western Europe, yet they were quite apart in culture and religion, a combination that triggered interest in Turkish affairs.1 Particularly important were political affairs. The Ottoman government inspired a variety of opinions among European travelers and thinkers. During the 18th century, the Ottomans lost their image as formidable and eventually ceased to provoke curiosity in the European public. They were no longer dreaded as the “public calamity”; nor were they greatly respected as the “most modern government” on earth. Rather, they were regarded as a dull and backward sort of people. From the 16th century to the 19th century, the European observers employed two similar, yet different, concepts to characterize the government of the Ottoman Empire. The concept of tyranny was widely used during the 16th and 17th centuries, whereas the concept of despotism was used to depict the regime of the Ottomans in the 18th century. The transition from the term “tyranny” to that of “despotism” in the 18th century indicates a radical change in the European images of the Ottoman Empire. Although both of these terms designate corrupt and perverse regimes in Western political thought, a distinction was made between tyranny and despotism, and it mattered crucially which term was applied to the Ottoman state. European observers of the empire gave special meanings to these key concepts over time. “Tyranny” allowed for both positive and negative features, whereas “despotism” had no redeeming features. Early modern Europeans emphasized both admirable and frightening aspects of Ottoman greatness. On the other hand, the concept of despotism was redefined as inherently Oriental in the 18th century and employed to depict the corruption and backwardness of the Ottoman government. This transformation was profoundly reflected in the beliefs of Europeans about the East. That is, 18th century thought on Ottoman politics contains a Eurocentric analysis of Oriental despotism that is absent from the discussions of Ottoman tyranny in earlier centuries.

Hard to swallow: women, poison, and Hindu widowburning, 1500–1700

European accounts of the Hindu practice of sati, or widowburning, in India appear at least as early as Diodorus in 317 BC, and become, after the Portuguese landfall in India at the end of the fifteenth century, customary in European travelogues. My article centres on the ‘mimetic circulation’ of an infamous anecdote in several early modern European narratives of sati. This story defines widowburning as a social response to the ‘custom’ of Indian women poisoning their husbands. The travellers' persistent reliance on the poison tale mediates in the contact between Europeans and Indians, for the story functions as a powerful rhetorical device in European accounts of India. The question then becomes ‘What are the cultural ramifications of the insistent recurrence of the poison legend in the context of Indian widowburning in so many diverse European travelogues?’ And, if European representational practices are always self-reflexive and ‘can never be detached from European projection’, what does the use of this anecdote tell us about the early modern Europeans themselves? Finally, in the context of the travellers' origins, what role does the nexus between women and poisoning uncovered both in the legend and in early modern Europe play in the larger discursive apparatuses of future colonial enterprise?

Makers of the early Aurignacian of Europe.

Despite intensive study and a number of remarkable discoveries in the last two decades of the 20th century, our understanding of the cultural and biological processes that resulted in the emergence of the Upper Paleolithic and the establishment of modern humans in Interpleniglacial Europe remains far from complete. There is active debate concerning the timing and location of the origins of the Aurignacian, the nature of the origins of Initial Upper Paleolithic industries (whether by autochthonous development or through acculturation by Aurignacian peoples), the timing of the appearance of early modern humans and the disappearance of the Neandertals, and the relationship of archeologically defined cultures to these different types of hominids. Frustrating our attempts to address these latter two questions is a general paucity of taxonomically diagnostic human fossil material from early Upper Paleolithic contexts. We undertake here a review of the human fossil record of Interpleniglacial Europe, and its archeological and chronological context, to clarify to the extent possible the nature of the relationship between hominid groups and the earliest Upper Paleolithic artifact industries, particularly the early Aurignacian. Although substantial difficulties involved in interpreting the fossil, archeological, and geochronological records of this time period prohibit making any definitive statements, a number of observations are suggested by the current data: 1) the Middle Paleolithic of Europe appears to have been made exclusively by Neandertals; 2) Initial Upper Paleolithic industries (with the exception of the Bachokirian) appear to have their roots in the late Middle Paleolithic industries of their respective regions; 3) all of the human fossils yet recovered from Initial Upper Paleolithic (except the Bachokirian) contexts for which any diagnostic morphology is present have their greatest morphological affinities with Neandertals and not early modern humans; 4) modern humans were almost certainly established in Europe by ca. 32 ky BP, with a strong possibility that they were there by ca. 36 ky BP. Claims for an appearance before 36 ky BP cannot be substantiated with currently available evidence; 5) the hypothesis that modern humans are uniquely associated with the Aurignacian cannot yet be refuted. Aurignacian-associated human fossils (including those from the Bachokirian) for which any diagnostic morphology is present have their greatest affinities with early modern Europeans and not Neandertals; and 6) Neandertals and modern humans coexisted in Europe for at least 2,000-4,000 years, and perhaps for 8,000-10,000 years or longer. The overall picture is one of an extended period of cultural contact, involving some degree of genetic exchange, between Neandertals and early modern Europeans.

Between carnival and lent: the scientific revolution at the margins of culture.

Between Carnival and Lent: The Scientific Revolution at the Margins of Culture Paula Findlen (bio) How curious, after all, is the way in which we moderns think about the world! And it is all so novel, too. E. A. Burtt In the half-century since the “Scientific Revolution” became a meaningful description of the transformation of attitudes toward nature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it seems to have enjoyed more lives than the Cheshire cat and to have remained as enigmatic. 1 Since its original formulation in the late 1940s, it has been the topic of a lively debate about the origins and character of modern approaches to nature and, more generally, knowledge. The result has been not only increased skepticism that the Scientific Revolution could be reduced to any single narrative, but also a profusion [End Page 243] of narratives about what constituted its fundamental characteristics. As Hayden White observes, “any given set of real events can be emplotted in a number of ways, can bear the weight of being told as any number of different stories.” 2 In the process, the Scientific Revolution, perhaps more than any other area of science studies, has become a testing ground for new approaches to the historical understanding of science and new ways of understanding the process of scientific change. Why should we feel so compelled to tell and retell this particular story in the history of science, when there are so many other episodes worthy of our attention? Surely part of the fascination lies in the sense that the Scientific Revolution is, in many respects, the original story in the history of science. From the sixteenth century onward, humanist natural philosophers—from the anatomist Andreas Vesalius to the astronomer Johannes Kepler—wrote the histories of various sciences in order to publicize the importance of their reformation of knowledge. By the eighteenth century they had become the story, protagonists of a narrative rewritten by new scholarly communities in search of modern ruptures with the past. 3 The crafting of scientific narrative has been a prolonged and self-conscious exercise in which scientists as well as historians have participated over the centuries—all the more so because neither the scientist nor the historian enjoyed distinct intellectual identities until fairly recently (quite often, as the case of the seventeenth-century statesman, historian, and natural philosopher Francis Bacon demonstrates well, they were the same person). Accordingly, we might see the Scientific Revolution as one of the fundamental experiments in narrating the history of science. While the grand narrative of the Scientific Revolution has largely been a story of the rise of modern science that takes science in a fairly defined sense as its focal point, cultural approaches to the history of science suggest a variety of other possibilities that explore in greater detail the imagery that early modern Europeans had at their disposal when they attempted to describe nature. Such imagery was [End Page 244] not simply an afterthought to the study of nature; often it was so deeply embedded in the act of seeing and understanding nature that it would be impossible to separate how a particular natural philosopher viewed nature from how he viewed culture. 4 Defining nature and defining culture were complementary activities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If we wish to truly understand what it meant to do early modern science, then we need to think more carefully about what it meant to be early modern. The approach I am suggesting has already had a number of advocates. Several years ago, John Schuster remarked that “the Scientific Revolution consisted of a process of change and displacement among and within competing systems of natural philosophy,” and he recommended that historians look more carefully at the “privileged images, metaphors or models” that defined these different approaches to knowledge. 5 The literature exploring the fundamental cultural themes of the early modern period can be a rich resource for expanding our interpretations of the Scientific Revolution. 6 Since nature was never an isolated subject of study during this period but always part of some larger project, we should examine more closely those features of early modern society that best illuminate the place of...

Gog and Magog On Mappaemundi and Early Printed World Maps: Orientalizing Ethnography in the Apocalyptic Tradition

AbstractGog and Magog, the apocalyptic destroyers prophesied in the book of Revelations, gave concrete expression to the apocalyptic climate that dominated medieval thinking about the future-and the present. They permeated medieval texts and appeared in most maps of the world. Historians are coming to understand medieval and early modern world maps not primarily as rather primitive technical tools but as cultural documents. Such maps expressed in graphic form the world view(s) of medieval elites (princely, scholarly, mercantile). The traditional contents of mappaemundi and early printed maps place them firmly in the tradition of medieval learning, yet they show signs very early on of skeptical and "empirical" questioning directed at received (mainly ancient) wisdom concerning the existence, location, population, and qualities of traditional cartographic *topoi (e.g., the kingdom of Prester John). As Renaissance source-scholarship, rules of evidence, and overseas exploration reshaped cartography, world maps underwent both a rapid transformation into sources of up-to-date information and a certain retrenchment of traditional contents, especially in distant and marginal areas. Gog and Magog are among the principal remnants of the medieval dream of the world. They appear, often with reference to Marco Polo, on world maps well into the seventeenth century. Early modern Europeans continued to view much of the world through medieval lenses.

The structuring of political territory in early printed atlases

Abstract The atlas emerged as a cartographic and bibliographic response to early modern Europeans’ search for geographical order in a rapidly changing world. In particular, atlases were mediators in the restructuring of European ideas about political territory which culminated in the emergence (by the end of the eighteenth century) of the territorial state and its progeny, the nation‐state. For more than two centuries atlases defined political territories ever more precisely for their readers and expressed hierarchical relationships among those territories, while giving form to the political territoriality and geopolitical orientations of particular nations.

Seventeenth-century interpretations of the past: the case of Geoffrey Keating

The study of history at both national and local levels featured prominently among the intellectual activities of early modern Europeans. The desire to know more of their own countries (as evidenced by the growth of mapmaking) and the use of history as a political tool both played important parts in the emergence of the past as a vital force in the present. The same was true of early modern Ireland. Settlers coming to a new environment looked to the past both as a way of understanding their new home, and as a way of legitimising current political realities. Sir James Perrott noted in the introduction to his Chronicle of Ireland ‘the use of reading histories is twofold: either private for a man’s particular knowledge and information, or public for the application of it to the service of the state’ Thus Sir John Davies’s treatise on the Discovery of the true causes why Ireland was never entirely subdued was as much a justification of existing royal policy in Ireland as an explanation of Irish history Each, for his own reasons, was looking to the past to explain the present.