Ayesha Ramachandran’s Worldmakers is a natural fit for the University of Chicago Press, a leading publisher of historically grounded studies of space and place in culture. Ramachandran is both theoretically nuanced and empirically grounded, wide-ranging in her sources and attentive to geographic specificity. Worldmaking is a “double-edged” term of David Hume’s that “refers both to the actual origin and order of the physical world as well as to the theories that we invent to comprehend the vastness of the whole” (9). (Giambattista Vico’s poetic vision is an acknowledged inspiration for this book.) Ramachandran analyzes atlases, epic poems, and natural philosophies from the Netherlands, France, Portugal, and England and from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries to document how European cartographers, philosophers, natural philosophers, and poets contributed to an epistemic shift from a divinely revealed to a human-made world.How should we synthesize and imagine a whole world when, cognitively, we have access only to parts? The act of imagination required to move between part and whole, fragmented and totalizing knowledge, Ramachandran argues, is grounded in poeisis. The world comes into modernity through metaphysics and poetic imagination as much as it does through techniques and scientific knowledge. The consequence, and Ramachandran’s greatest insight, is an ethical impulse that distinguishes worldmaking from imperialism. Building on the scholarship of Thomas Greene and David Quint, she shows that imagining the world can represent what resists conquering and so can act as a counterbalance to the violence of imperialism. The moral argument fully justifies her focus on a canonical set of European male authors whose global vision at the dawn of modernity, she recognizes, might otherwise have somber protocolonial resonances. It is also a wonderful prehistory of the 1968 NASA images of Earth from space that she uses as the vanishing point of her study.Chapter 1 concerns the tensions between human and divine worldmaking in Gerardus Mercator’s Atlas (1595). Ramachandran says that the Renaissance atlas “defines an intellectual watershed by seeking to envision the totality of the world” (24) and that its inclusion of the human body as a metaphor for the map is new. Actually, the Ebstorf mappa mundi and some others had already represented the whole known world as a human body, but the import is correct, since in Ebstorf the known world (the body of Christ) is divinely made, whereas the maker of the Atlas is human. Like Mercator’s 1538 Orbis imago, his Atlas broke with the generic tradition of cosmography and with Ptolemy’s Geographia, whose “view of the world as a finite object” was replaced by the ethically problematic, “dynamic and mobile” modern world (47–48). Even as the Atlas (and the genre it inaugurated) claims transcendent knowledge, it enacts a moral dilemma that makes the world map a more contemplative, even a more humble, project than we might think.Chapter 2 examines the skeptical worldmaking of three chapters in Michel de Montaigne’s Essais, the “Apologie de Raimond Sebond,” “Des coches,” and “Des cannibales.” Moi confronts monde as Montaigne’s self and the “proliferating fullness of the world” (70) co-construct each other. In this dialectic, the American continent of the New World supports the skeptical project of the “Apologie” by unraveling European epistemologies. Montaigne’s self and his world mirror each other through disorder and multiplicity, constituting each other through fragments. Whereas Mercator’s cartography gestures toward wholeness, Montaigne presses toward unknowability. The Essais alternate Platonic and Epicurean references so as to “resist the very idea of wholeness” but still “reach out, with moral clarity, toward a vision of the whole” (78), making multiplicity the order of the sublunary world, while God is its unknowable opposite. As in the first chapter, the premise is overtly schematic, a supposed “rootedness and stability in relation to the external world” of the Cartesian self (73) that might have been complicated by consideration of work by Dalia Judovitz and others on the instability and literary artifice of Descartes’s worldmaking, but the conclusion to this particularly strong section lends weight to earlier accounts of Montaigne’s negative or apophatic theology by Hugo Friedrich and, more recently, Jan Miernowski.Chapter 3 analyzes the resistance to ideological projects of conquest in the “worldly epics” of empire by Luís de Camões and Edmund Spenser. Ramachandran argues that Camões and Spenser were the first to fully realize that the cosmographic world-building potential of epic is distinct from empire building. Both authors celebrate romance “errance” and travel: in Camões’s Os Lusíadas, greatness comes from knowledge of the world rather than from possession, while Spenser’s Faerie Queene prioritizes “the imagined form of a global system” (128) over direct observation or control. In both epics the end of ancient empire signals the necessity of social change and the passage beyond empire to modernity.Chapter 4, “Cartesian Romance,” starts with Descartes’s worried reaction to Galileo’s 1633 condemnation for heresy. As the title of his Le monde indicates, Descartes was, like Galileo, “first and foremost a worldmaker” (148), but he was troubled enough by Galileo’s fate to suppress the treatise and turn his gaze from worldmaking to an interrogation of the relations between fiction and the real. Despite Descartes’s desire to eliminate uncertainty in the physical world, his thought experiments about the fallibility of the senses end up establishing fiction as a cornerstone of modernity. Beyond Cartesian subjectivity lies nothing less than a new myth of origins: the world is a fable and can thus be told—made—by the philosopher. As the philosopher re-creates the world, he comes dangerously close to paralleling divine creative power, as seen by the claim in Le monde that he will “beget” (“je ferai naître”) the world. Ramachandran cites John Paul II’s identifying Cartesianism as a rupture point after which human, not divine, consciousness becomes primary. She acknowledges that the papal account simplifies Descartes’s views; her own clearheaded contribution lies in showing how the audacity of Descartes’s worldmaking has led followers to understand his thought as dethroning the divine.Ramachandran’s superb final chapter reads John Milton’s Paradise Lost as a “clash of worldmaking narratives” (185). The cosmic vastness of Milton’s writing is balanced by the his power to contain, imagine, and rewrite that vastness. Confronting a question that even Descartes sidestepped, Milton stages a direct confrontation between faith-based and empirical world knowledge and probes the implications for Genesis: a dangerous, “almost unutterable question” (185) despite the growth of naturalistic explanations for the origins of the world. Indeed, Milton juxtaposes multiple scales, worlds, and origin stories, for example the Satanic project of empire versus the greater scope of the universal world, from the domestic Garden of Eden to outer space. In Milton’s references to the telescope and to Galilean astronomy, Ramachandran finds meditations on the power of imaginative poetry to sound the depths of the universe, while his contrasts between Satan and Raphael portray both the problems and the potential of exploration. In a clever move, Ramachandran shows that the movement between science and fiction (poetry) is bidirectional, for they posed many of the same questions about the relations between earth and heaven, the boundaries of the universe, and the location of God (193–95). Paradise Lost participates in this epistemological proliferation not by providing an answer but by staging uncertainty. It replaces the relatively stable cosmologies of Christian-Platonic thought with the dizzying, unending space of materialist philosophy and modern astronomy; the ex nihilo creation story of Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas becomes a prismatic Genesis and a reflection on the power of poetry to replace stable order and symmetry. Ultimately, the burden of worldmaking falls to “individuals who must now confront a vast, fractured whole and make it meaningful” (220).Ramachandran’s innovative book allies the best traditions of comparative literature scholarship with cartographic history and cultural geography. Her sources are both broad in scope and detailed in focus; her meticulous readings and contextualizations reveal worldmaking to be a central intellectual task of early European modernity. We have not lost the enchantment of a world made for us by God, she argues, but relocated that enchantment in human imagination and creative endeavor. The appeal of projects like Google Earth, with which Ramachandran concludes, is not far removed from the epistemological shift of Renaissance worldmaking in its quest to make sense of an array of particular and contingent parts without succumbing to exclusionary universalism. As we confront the flux of digital knowledge and the expansion of space travel, books like Ramachandran’s remind us that modern worldmaking might indeed not have been thinkable without the Renaissance. The Worldmakers is an important book for modernity. But it is also a consummate, beautiful, and original study of the Renaissance on its own terms, showing that even in canonical texts of European humanism, there is much new territory to be explored.