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What is "Europe," and when did it come to be? In the Renaissance, the term "Europe" circulated widely. But as Katharina N. Piechocki argues in this compelling book, the continent itself was only in the making in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Cartographic Humanism sheds new light on how humanists negotiated and defined Europe's boundaries at a momentous shift in the continent's formation: when a new imagining of Europe was driven by the rise of cartography. As Piechocki shows, this tool of geography, philosophy, and philology was used not only to represent but, more importantly, also to shape and promote an image of Europe quite unparalleled in previous centuries. Engaging with poets, historians, and mapmakers, Piechocki resists an easy categorization of the continent, scrutinizing Europe as an unexamined category that demands a much more careful and nuanced investigation than scholars of early modernity have hitherto undertaken. Unprecedented in its geographic scope, Cartographic Humanism is the first book to chart new itineraries across Europe as it brings France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Portugal into a lively, interdisciplinary dialogue.… (more)
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Such linguistic and conceptual leaps may garner approving nods from lit-crit academics of a postmodernist/poststructuralist bent (Foucault, Derrida, Mignolo, and others of their ilk are approvingly quoted and cited throughout), but they are tougher for historians to accept. For example, Piechocki claims at one point (115) that by joining a book about Europe and a book about Asia in one volume with the title Cosmographia in Asiae & Europae eleganti descriptione, “Tory forces the reader to halt before the toponyms displayed in the title and therefore contemplate the fine continental line emerging within the Eurasian territory.” Piechocki does not explain how she can know with such certainty that a mere title forced the early modern reader to both halt and contemplate the very borderlines she thinks they should be contemplating. In another place (145), Piechocki asserts that the Greek myth of the rape of Europa is illustrative of a “(male) desire… to stake out virgin territory” and the “cartographer’s desire to mark territory in female shape/form,” rather than just a tale of lascivious Zeus tailored to lusty Hellenic listeners. In her conclusion, like in her introduction, Piechocki proposes an interesting thesis: that Europe “was in the making in the early modern period” (231) and it was “propelled by the emergence of a novel humanistic discipline: cartography” (232). The arcane literary analyses she performs on bits of humanist texts, coupled with jargon-laden terminology and opaque syntax so beloved of literary theorists, do not really prove that intriguing thesis. The idea of Europe and continental difference can be found in maps, geographical writings, and even in poems and fictional works of the period without such convoluted contentions.