early modern cultures of translation...happy race of people called the hyperboreans, who live to...

Early Modern Cultures of TranslationKaren Newman, Jane Tylus

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

Karen Newman. and Jane Tylus. Early Modern Cultures of Translation.Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Project MUSE. Web. 27 Jul. 2015. http://muse.jhu.edu/.

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C h a p t e r 4

Erroneous Mappings: Ptolemy and the Visualization of Europe’s East

Katharina N. Piechocki

When Pliny the Elder, in the fourth book of his Natural History, turns to a de-scription of Europe’s northeastern coast, moving past the Don (Tanais) River, he halts before the Riphean Mountains. Th ese mountains, he contends, are in

a part of the world that lies under the condemnation of nature and is plunged in dense darkness, and occupied only by the work of frost and the chilly lurking-places of the north wind. Behind these moun-tains and beyond the north wind there dwells (if we can believe it) a happy race of people called the Hyperboreans, who live to extreme old age and are famous for legendary marvels. Here are believed to be the hinges on which the fi rmament turns and the extreme limits of the revolutions of the stars, with six months’ daylight and a single day of the sun in retirement. . . . Some authorities have placed these people not in Europe but on the nearest part of the coasts of Asia, because there is a race there with similar customs and a similar loca-tion, named the Attaci.1

Pliny locates the Riphean and Hyperborean Mountains at the edge of the world. Beyond these mountains dwell the Hyperboreans, the legendary gens felix; here also may be the hinges of the world (cardines mundi). But in Pliny’s text the mountains are made to serve as a twofold and ambiguous border. Th ey

Erroneous Mappings 77

mark the limits of the oikoumene, the inhabited world known to the Romans, as well as dividing Europe from Asia. Th us, the mountains concomitantly sep-arate one continent from another and the inhabited world from the legendary world of the Hyperboreans. Far from being a straightforward line of demar-cation, then, Pliny’s Riphean and Hyperborean mountain range emerges as a limes whose location cannot easily be determined, if indeed it can be located at all.

In fact, the fi ctitious chain of the Riphean and Hyperborean Mountains had already been introduced by Homer and Aristotle, and described by an-cient geographers such as Strabo, Pomponius Mela, and Ptolemy, as well as Pliny. Th e idea of their existence was revived during the Renaissance, when the rediscovery of Ptolemy’s Geography in Europe prompted the emergence of the discipline of cartography. Absent from medieval mappae mundi, the Riphean and Hyperborean Mountains started to emerge on fi fteenth- and six-teenth-century maps as mobile markers of boundaries and “natural” demar-cation lines of Europe’s eastern territories. As we shall see, it was the Polish humanist Maciej Miechowita who fi rst challenged Ptolemy’s description of the Riphean Mountains in his 1517 treatise titled Tractatus de duabus Sarmatiis. Yet despite Miechowita’s claim that these mountains were imaginary, car-tographers continued to inscribe them on maps throughout the sixteenth century.

Th e aim of this chapter is twofold. First, I discuss the rediscovery of Ptol-emy’s Geography in Europe as a linguistic and visual translation process. Ptolemy’s Geography was translated from Greek into Latin in the early years of the fi fteenth century and enjoyed immediate success across Europe in var-ious Latin and, subsequently, vernacular editions. Th ese editions triggered the rise of cartography as a complex process of visualizing the ancient trea-tises in an appropriate way, of translating words into images and maps. Sec-ond, my reading of Miechowita’s treatise together with the contemporary production of maps centering on eastern Europe off ers a unique—and hith-erto little studied—vantage point from which to examine the collision be-tween two epistemological frameworks: the slow and nonlinear translation and visualization process of partially mythical and ill-informed ancient geo-graphic knowledge against the backdrop of the growing empirical knowledge about Europe’s East. Taking the Riphean and Hyperborean Mountains as a powerful and quite unique example of erroneous mapping, I explore the cre-ation of early modern cartographic knowledge as well as the persistence of

78 Katharina N . Piechocki

nonknowledge inscribed on maps as a resistance to empirical knowledge—a resistance that arose from two factors: the persisting authority of ancient geographic and historical sources and a process of mistranslation.

Translating and Visualizing Ptolemy’s Geography in Fifteenth-Century Italy

Early modern cartography emerged as a process of visualization and transla-tion of ancient geographic knowledge. Cartography as the translation of geo-graphic knowledge and the fi gurative codifi cation of shifting spaces became particularly crucial during the “epoch of translations,”2 the fi fteenth and six-teenth centuries, when voyages of exploration and the mapping of hitherto unexplored territories signifi cantly infl uenced the understanding of Europe’s contours. Maps call our attention to the oblique relationship between words and images. Th ey serve as a reminder that words do not “illustrate” images or vice versa, but are subject to a complex hermeneutics that requires a skillful interpre-tive navigation between these two types of fi guration. Maps encapsulate knowl-edge, which unfolds diachronically, as well as the manifold linguistic, cultural, and visual translation processes at their very core. Renaissance cartography and cartographic writing, defi ned as writing between a poetic and geographic space,3 emerged together with and as a humanist practice of translation.

In the last years of the fourteenth century, Byzantine émigrés such as Manuel Chrysoloras, who settled in Florence to promote the study of ancient Greek,4 introduced hitherto unknown ancient Greek and Latin texts to Italy.5 Among the manuscripts Chrysoloras brought in 1397 was Claudius Ptolemy’s Geography, already partially translated by Chrysoloras himself.6 Ptolemy, a Ro-man citizen whose mother tongue was Greek, lived and wrote in Alexandria.7 His seminal work on geography and cartography, Geographike Hyphegesis (writ-ten ca. 150 ce), circulated widely in Arabic in the Middle East, where it served as the basis for medieval Arab maps and charts. But it remained unknown in Europe until the last years of the fourteenth century, when it became one of the most—if not the most—authoritative texts on the geography and cartog-raphy of the oikoumene. From the fi fteenth to the seventeenth centuries, Ptol-emy’s Geography served as an undisputed catalyst for the rich production of maps and charts in Renaissance Europe. Ptolemy’s practical instructions for representing the globe on a two-dimensional surface were taken up as a nov-elty by cartographers and artists alike.


Early fi fteenth-century translations and editions of Ptolemy’s Geography reveal the instability of cartographic terminology due to the hesitant applica-tion and location of ancient toponyms in a period radically diff erent from Latin antiquity. According to some historians of cartography, the Renaissance trans-lations of Ptolemy and humanist refl ection upon the Geography’s nomenclature made more of an impact on the creation of early modern cartographic termi-nology than the actual discovery of new territories. David Woodward has claimed that “more printed maps of the world owed their allegiance to Ptolemy in the fi rst fi fty years of map printing than to the new discoveries, even though by the end of that half-century period Magellan’s Vittoria had sailed round the world.”8 As John W. Hessler has recently pointed out, “the infl uence of Ptole-my’s Geographia during the Renaissance in Europe cannot be overstated.”9

Th e Geography was fi rst translated from Greek into Latin in the fi rst de-cade of the fi fteenth century. Th e Italian humanist Leonardo Bruni, one of Chrysoloras’s students and the author of the fi rst theoretical Renaissance trea-tise on translation, De interpretatione recta (ca. 1424), followed Chrysoloras in his attempt to translate Ptolemy’s Geography. From a letter he addressed to Niccolò Niccoli we know that Bruni fi nally abandoned this translation proj-ect,10 which was eventually completed by Jacopo Angeli da Scarperia.11 Angeli da Scarperia, who had owned a manuscript of the Geography since 1400, was encouraged by Cardinal Peter Filargis of Candia to revise and complete Chrysoloras’s version for publication,12 a task Angeli accomplished in 1409–1410.13 Ptolemy’s Geography then appeared under the title Cosmographia.

Angeli da Scarperia dedicated his Latin translation14 to Pope Alexan-der V.15 In the dedication, he emphasized the importance of Greek language and culture for the study of geography and cartography. According to Angeli, the Romans (and Pliny the Elder in particular) were “unambitious, unmath-ematical, and anecdotal”: they neglected the “problems of depicting scale, the calculation of longitude and latitude, and techniques of celestial measure-ment.” None of the Latin writers, Angeli continues, “explains how our globe, which is spherical, can be described on a two-dimensional surface.”16 For this reason he had undertaken the task of translating Ptolemy from Greek into Latin.17 Furthermore, Angeli traces the translation of power and knowledge from antiquity to his own times. He establishes a translatio imperii, creating a genealogy that runs from Alexander the Great to the Alexandrian geogra-pher Ptolemy to Pope Alexander V, under whose aegis Italy will come to real-ize its imperialist project: “A kind of divine presentiment of your [Pope Alexander V’s] soon-to-be-realized empire impelled you to desire the work,


so that you could learn clearly from it how ample would be the power you would soon hold over the entire world.”18 Angeli’s project is thus more than a linguistic translation—it strongly promotes the idea of imperial expansion un-der the guidance of the Roman pope.

Already the chancellor of the Republic of Florence, Coluccio Salutati, as well as the banker and humanist Palla Strozzi, “the most important backers of Chrysoloras’ mission,”19 had envisaged a translatio studii through the trans-lation and dissemination of important and powerful texts from Greek antiq-uity. Ptolemy’s Geography was considered to be such a text. Despite the fact that the editio princeps of Angeli’s translation did not contain maps,20 which were added only in subsequent editions,21 quite understandably “the visual and theoretical elements of Ptolemy’s work . . . came to exert far greater infl u-ence across the Italian peninsula” than its exhaustive catalogues of ancient top-onyms, which “even to many committed antiquarians, must have seemed ar-cane, dry, and hopelessly out of date.”22 In the fi rst half of the fi fteenth century, Florence was known for its botteghe, the workshops of illuminators, bookbind-ers, scribes, and, later on, printers; and the production of the Geography soon became part of the fl ourishing publishing industry. Th e gridded maps pro-duced by these workshops allowed for a radically new cartographic design that signifi cantly diff ered from the schematism of the medieval mappae mundi.23

Although there is no evidence that Ptolemy himself had actually produced maps, Renaissance humanists considered the maps that Chrysoloras brought with him from Byzantium to be contemporaneous with Ptolemy. Yet of the fi fty-three extant Greek manuscripts of Ptolemy’s Geography, none was pro-duced before the late thirteenth century. Hence, a time span of over one thou-sand years separates the earliest extant manuscripts from Ptolemy’s original text,24 allowing the translational uncertainties posed by single words and top-onyms to enter the interpretive spaces between geographic description and depiction. Florian Mittenhuber notes that “the drawing of a map is the trans-lation of a text into an image. When the text contains instructions on how to create the drawing, and the original maps have also survived, the text and maps can be checked against each other.”25 In the case of Ptolemy’s manuscripts, this was obviously not possible. However, the cartographic relationship be-tween text and image is not only a question of comparing extant materials: it is also a careful process of resisting errors—while inevitably introducing them.

Jonathan Bloom has argued that “ancient authors such as Vitruvius, Pliny the Elder, and Galen actually avoided illustrating their works and advised oth-ers against the practice because images would soon be corrupted in the hands


of copyists.”26 Copying a word, though, was understandably less diffi cult than copying a map. “Complex visual data could not be communicated via visual media; for the most part, such data had to be translated into verbal discourse, primarily that of the written word.”27 From the purely pragmatic perspective of an ancient scriptorium, “if a reader dictated a text to ten copyists, there re-sulted ten copies of the same text, albeit with potential variations in the styles of handwriting that would not, in principle, compromise the legibility of the alphabetic text. Images could not, of course, be dictated in the same fashion.”28 Images followed a diff erent logic of replication and circulation, and it is not surprising that Ptolemaic map production rapidly increased during the sec-ond half of the fi fteenth century, concomitantly with the development of printed books, when the reader-copyist system slowly became obsolete. While ancient geographers rarely copied maps, Ptolemy’s interest in visualizing space allowed him to perfect “a system of plotting geometric coordinates in which a pair of numbers (representing longitude and latitude) could describe every signifi cant point on a map.”29 It seems, however, that Ptolemy’s system of map production remained hypothetical and was, as far as we know, never put into practice. While favoring potential map productions, his system was, at the same time, designed to allow the translation of images into num-bers. Or as Jonathan Bloom observes: “Th e alphanumeric data in his com-mentaries contained all the necessary information to generate these images afresh without recourse to earlier drawings. Ptolemy’s greatness lies, there-fore, in his discovery of how to transform images into a sequence of letters and numerals that could be recorded and transmitted without distortion. In eff ect, he was the fi rst to digitize images.”30

Ptolemy was thus the fi rst to theorize and elaborate a system of digital cartographic translatability and the conversion of iconic into numeric data. While his maps are not extant—or never existed, as some scholars claim—his Geography off ered, for the fi rst time, a method for producing and repro-ducing visual images by transposing alphanumeric data onto a gridded and uniformly scaled surface.

Charting Cartographies in Europe’s East

Around 1460, Nicolaus Germanus, a Benedictine friar of German origin, de-veloped a new set of Ptolemaic maps.31 Germanus recognized that previous models as well as older Byzantine maps could not have used the techniques


that Ptolemy described in his work. Germanus based his own maps, one of which he presented to Borso d’Este of Ferrara, on a sustained reading of the theoreti-cal part of Ptolemy’s Geography, which enabled him to off er a new visualization of the oikoumene. His maps became a crucial point of reference for subsequent cartographers and were disseminated across Europe (Figure 7). On Germanus’s map, eastern Europe is imagined after Ptolemy, who had posited the limes be-tween Europe and Asia as the Don River (also known by the Greek name Tanais), and named the borderlands on each side of the river the “two Sarma-tias.”32 In Ptolemy’s Geography, the territory of Sarmatia (nowadays Poland, the Baltic States, and Ukraine) is permeated by numerous (and fi ctitious) mountain chains, such as the Riphean Mountains, which gives it the appearance of a tightly knit web of knotted ropes, forming the region’s centerpiece and the map’s distinctive visual feature. Th e mountain chains span the region diagonally,

Figure 7. Nicolaus Germanus, ca. 1460. Cosmographia Claudii Ptolomaei Alexandrini, “Eight Map of Eu rope (Sarmatia).” Manuscript and Archive Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, 427027.


from northeast to southwest: from the source of the Tanais River (the Riphean Mountains, according to the imagery of the ancients) to “Germania.”33

Th e rediscovery, translation, and visualization of Ptolemy’s Geography, which allowed the localization of the source of the Tanais River, thus triggered the question about the precise location of the Riphean Mountains. Renaissance cartographers like Germanus placed the Riphean Mountains in eastern Europe. However, Germanus moved the mountains like a mobile set piece across the map from Europe’s borders with Asia, where Pliny had located them in his Natural History, to the very center of eastern Europe. On Germanus’s map, the Riphean Mountains do not function as a natural boundary between two continents or a powerful line of demarcation between the oikoumene and the fi ctional world of the Hyperboreans. Rather, they occupy the entire region like an obstacle course, turning eastern Europe into an inaccessible and impenetrable part of Europe.

Th e Polish historian, astronomer, and physician Maciej Miechowita (1457c.–1523), the author of the fi rst printed history of Poland, Chronica Polo-norum (1519),34 was the fi rst European humanist to challenge Ptolemy’s de-scription and the Renaissance cartographers’ mapping of the Riphean Mountains. It is to a particularly complex boundary that Miechowita dedi-cates his treatise: the continental divide between Europe and Asia. In his 1517 Tractatus de duabus Sarmatiis Asiana et Europiana et de contentis in eis, Miechowita dismissed the Riphean Mountains as a fi ctitious mountain chain.35 Published in Kraków, the capital of the Polish kingdom, the treatise was dis-seminated across Europe in successive Latin editions as well as in German, Polish, Italian, and Dutch translations.36 Its 1535 translation into Polish by Andrzej Glaber z Kobylina makes the Tractatus one of the fi rst texts published in the Polish vernacular. Moreover, it was the fi rst work by a Polish author to be translated into Italian, and was included in Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s seminal 1583 travel anthology, Navigazioni e viaggi, in a translation by Anni-bal Maggi, alongside such authors as Marco Polo, Columbus, and Vespucci. Immediately after its publication, Miechowita’s Tractatus provided a blueprint for European cosmographers, historians, travelers, and politicians to rethink the topographies, languages, and cultures of eastern Europe and to conceptual-ize Europe’s eastern boundaries. Highly invested in a study of both ancient and medieval geographic and historical accounts and of cosmographers’ descrip-tions of the origins and migrations of European and Asian peoples, Miechow-ita understood that territories are subject to continuous movements and shifts.

Miechowita wrote his treatise at a time when several other Polish human-ists, cosmographers, and cartographers were refl ecting upon the cartographic


representation of eastern Europe, and of Poland in particular. In 1506, Jan of Głogów, a professor of astronomy at Jagellonian University, published a commentary on Sacrobosco’s Introductorium in tractatum Sphaerae, which, according to Leszek Hajdukiewicz, contains fragments commenting upon the discovery of the New World.37 Th e next year, 1507, marked a crucial mo-ment in discovery-related mapmaking for both the East and the West: in that year Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann famously included the name “America” in their world map titled Universalis Cosmographia.38 In the same year, the Polish cartographer and historian Bernard Wapowski (ca. 1450–1535), cathedral canon at Kraków, collaborated on Marco Beneven-tano’s 1507 Rome edition of Ptolemy’s Geography (Figure 8). Th is edition included twenty-seven ancient maps depicting the Ptolemaic oikoumene next to six modern maps of newly discovered territories.39 In particular, Wapowski helped to map Europe’s hitherto unknown eastern territories,40 creating what is considered to be the fi rst modern map of Poland. Among the map’s most

Figure 8. Marco Beneventano. Rome, 1507. Tabula Moderna Polonie, Ungarie, Boemie, Germanie, Russie, Lithuanie. Rapperswill, Polish Museum, CRP: 00100-04939. Map image from the Collection of Cartographia Rappersvilliana Polonorum Rapperswil, Switzerland.


prominent cartographic features are the Riphean Mountains, here called “Rissei Montes” (Figure 9).

In 1512, Jan Stobnica published an edition of Ptolemy titled Introductio in Ptolemaei Cosmographiam (a second edition followed in 1519). Besides pro-viding references to Amerigo Vespucci and the “mundus novus,” Stobnica’s Introductio contains an abridged version of Enea Silvio Piccolomini’s treatise De Europa—which Stobnica titled Epitoma Europe—as well as Piccolomini’s treatise De Asia, Isidore of Seville’s Sirie compendiosa descriptio, Paulus Oso-rius’s Africe brevis descriptio, and Anselm’s Terrae sancte & Urbis Hierusalem apertior descriptio.41 Stobnica contends that the western boundaries of the oik-oumene have shifted with the discovery of the “mundus novus,” the site of territories “unknown to Ptolemy and other ancients,” while Sarmatia, Europe’s eastern part, has remained unchanged.42 Piccolomini’s description of Europa thus exemplifi es and underscores what Stobnica considers to be “the immu-table [immutabile] parts of Sarmatia.”43

A look at the diff erent texts assembled in Stobnica’s Introductio makes it clear that the western and eastern parts of the oikoumene belong to two epistemologically disconnected frameworks. Similarly, Waldseemüller’s Universalis Cosmographia map features the portraits of both Vespucci and Ptolemy, juxtaposed as geographic authorities contemplating the shifting

Figure 9. Detail: Rissei [Riff ei] Montes. Marco Beneventano. Rome, 1507. Tabula Moderna Polonie, Ungarie, Boemie, Germanie, Russie, Lithuanie. Rapperswill, Polish Museum, CRP: 00100-04939. Map image from the Collection of Cartographia Rappersvilliana Polonorum Rapperswil, Switzerland.


boundaries of the “mundus novus” in the fi rst case and the immobilized borders of the oikoumene on the other. While Vespucci gazes at “America” (Figure 10), Ptolemy contemplates Europe, Asia, and Africa (Figure 11), the three continents described in his Geography.44 Termed a “transitional” or “synthetic” map,45 Waldseemüller’s map contains updated geographic knowledge in the west, while displaying an ancient, specifi cally Ptolemaic, spatial and toponymic organization of the oikoumene, in particular “the northern and eastern parts [which] have Ptolemaic, schematic or even imagi-nary shapes.”46 John W. Hessler has argued that “the Mediterranean and the north of Africa on the Waldseemüller 1507 map are very much Ptolemaic representations. Th e majority of the shapes and outlines of the coastlines of these regions are similar in appearance to those found in Ptolemy’s Geographia, even though Waldseemüller would have known them to be quite diff erent.”47 Yet the example of Sarmatia—and, in particular, the question of where to lo-cate and how to map the Riphean Mountains—shows that Europe’s East was perceived as a territory whose borders had been rendered unchangeable in deference to the long-standing authority of the ancients.

Stobnica’s Introductio is a unique example of cartographic writing or-ganized analogously to Waldseemüller’s map. Stobnica’s choice of texts to

Figure 10. Detail of Amerigo Vespucci. Martin Waldseemüller. Saint Dié, 1507. Universalis Cosmographia Secundum Ptholomaei Traditionem et Americi Vespucii Alioru[m]que Lustrationes. Washington, D.C., Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.


describe the “four parts” of the world shows that he relies on both Ptolemy and Vespucci: “Ptolemy translated [tradidit] the three parts of the world known to the ancients into twenty-six images [tabulis], of which ten are on Europe, four on Africa and twelve on Asia.”48 “Th e other, fourth, part”—that is, the New World—“has been invented by Amerigo Vespucci, a man of acute genius, and they want to name it ‘Amerige,’ ‘Land of Americo,’ so to speak, or ‘America’ after its inventor Amerigo himself.”49 Waldseemüller’s map as well as Piccolo-mini’s treatise De Asia, fi rst published together in Paris in 1509 by the French humanist Geoff roy Tory and then in Stobnica’s Introductio,50 recognize the Riphean Mountains as an intrinsic part of Europe’s East. In De Asia, Piccolo-mini writes that “the Apennines cut across all of Italy. On the other side, high summits run across Histria and Dalmatia to the Peloponnese and Th racia, and between the Rhine and the Danube emerges a mountain ridge, which, deriving from the Alps, dissolves toward Germany and Sarmatia. Above the sources of the Tanais River it reaches the Riphean Mountains, from which it joins the Caucasus and then the Taurus through the Caspian Antitaurus. Beyond the Taurus, the Romans allowed Antioch the Great to rule. One concludes that the entire continent can be understood as a series of mountains, although in many places it appears as not much more than a swelling [tumor].”51 Th us

Figure 11. Detail of Ptolemy. Martin Waldseemüller. Saint Dié, 1507. Universalis Cosmographia Secundum Ptholomaei Traditionem et Americi Vespucii Alioru[m]que Lustrationes. Washington, D.C., Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.


Piccolomini describes Europe’s geography and cartography as mountain chains stretching across the continent like a more or less pronounced “swelling.”

Th e Riphean Mountains did not disappear from early sixteenth-century maps, and the cartographic image of eastern Europe as an ill-defi ned network of orographic protuberances persisted. Considered “immutable,” these moun-tains took on the function not only of boundaries between Europe and Asia but also of natural highways traversing and connecting Europe’s hitherto poorly understood and described geography. Th e Riphean Mountains were translated not only onto modern maps but onto the fi rst globes as well. In 1515 the bishop of Babenberg, Johann Schöner, “one of the great neglected person-alities of the scientifi c revolution,”52 created a globe along with a cartographic work titled Cosmographia to describe and explain it. In the chapter focusing on “Europa,” Schöner states that “the Alps put forth three branches. Th e fi rst extends across Swabia, Bohemia, Silesia to Poland, where [Nikolaus] Krumpach calls the vernacular language Carpathian. Continuing, one proceeds to Russia, where the Riphean [Mountain] seems to rejoice in the perpetual breeze of winds.”53 Th us for Schöner in his Cosmographia the Riphean Mountains orig-inate in Europe and terminate in Asia, as orographic extensions of the Alps.

Only two years later, in 1517, Maciej Miechowita published his Tractatus de duabus Sarmatiis—the fi rst European treatise to overtly challenge the ex-istence of the Riphean Mountains. In several passages Miechowita underscored that the Riphean Mountains are a mere invention of ancient geographers who had never even traveled to those territories. In the dedication to his treatise, Miechowita writes:

[Ancient] writers claim that in the northern regions there are world-famous [orbe terrarum nominatissimos] mountains, called the Alan, Hyperborean, and Riphean mountains, from which fl ow no less famous rivers such as the Tanais, the major and minor Borysthenes, and the grand river Volga, described by cosmographers and famous poets in words and songs. Yet this is far from being true, since this information does not originate in a consideration of the thing itself (abs re)—experience is the teacher of sayable things—and has to be rejected as a profane and inexperienced declaration [prophanum, in-experteque provulgatum]. We know for certain and have seen that the Hyperborean, Riphean, and Alan mountains do not exist and that the above-mentioned rivers originate and have their sources in a fl at plain [ex terra plana].54


Th e publication of Miechowita’s treatise fueled discussions about the to-pography of eastern Europe and, in particular, about the veracity of the an-cient cosmographical claim that a lofty mountain chain, the mythical Riphean and Hyperborean Mountains, cut through Europe’s eastern regions, dividing not only the diff erent northeastern peoples from each other but also the in-habited from the uninhabited zones. Miechowita claimed that Europe’s East was entirely fl at and girded by a few fully passable hills.55 Th is claim—a bold rejection not only of ancient authorities, but also of authoritative near-con-temporaries and infl uential Italian humanists such as Enea Silvio Piccolomini and Flavio Biondo—received attention from Europe’s humanists, geographers, and politicians alike. Emperor Maximilian I sent his delegate Siegmund von Herberstein to the Grand Duchy of Muscovy, where he had already been on a diplomatic mission in 1517, in order to verify Miechowita’s geographic claims. Von Herberstein returned with an affi rmation of Miechowita’s fi ndings and a new travel account, Rerum Moscovitarum comentarii (1549),56 the fi rst sustained description of the Grand Duchy of Muscovy, albeit highly indebted to Miechowita’s Tractatus.57

In fact, Miechowita himself had never traveled to the lands that he described. His knowledge of the nonexistence of the Hyperborean, Riphean, and Alan Mountains stemmed from the accounts of political emigrants, soldiers, merchants, and prisoners of war.58 Th us his claim to have seen for himself the fl at plain where the ancients had located the alleged mountains should be taken with a grain of salt.59 Miechowita did base his treatise on ancient sources—traceable even in the choice of his Ptolemaic title—even while altering or dismissing them in a few specifi c instances. Familiar with maps such as Nicolaus Germanus’s “Sarmatia Europe,” where eastern Europe is depicted as a dense and formidable orographic grid, Miechowita proposed not only a new cartography but also a diff erent perception of Europe’s East, which now became open and accessible. Miechowita’s concomitant appropria-tion and rejection of Ptolemy constitutes a unique vantage point that discloses the selective adaptation of ancient geographic knowledge in early modern Europe. Th e specifi c example of the mountains off ers a particularly powerful insight into this adaptation and transformation process. As scholars have claimed, Miechowita’s emphasis on the absence of the mountains was politi-cally motivated—which may explain why this specifi c deviation from Ptolemy seemed so important to him. It allowed both the author and the Polish king Sigismund I (1467–1548), in whose service Miechowita was writing, to imagine and project Poland’s expansion to the east.


In the years during which Miechowita was writing the treatise, the Pol-ish king and the grand duke of Muscovy were competing for the territories east of the Polish Commonwealth—territories that Miechowita referred to by the Latin name “Sarmatia.” Although Muscovy was defeated in the battle of Orsha in 1514 and the Polish kingdom was charting an expansionist politics to the east, Muscovy’s subsequent conquest of Smolensk, as well as its increas-ing power, which resulted in the establishment of the Russian tsardom in 1547, made “Sarmatia” a contested battleground—a fl at plain, devoid of moun-tain chains, that could easily be traversed.

Th e fl atness of Europe’s East was strategically important, not only politi-cally but also economically. In his dedicatory epistle to Stanislas Turzo, bishop of the Bohemian town of Olomouc and member of a powerful banking fam-ily, Miechowita describes the topic of his treatise:

I wrote the subsequent Treatise on the two Sarmatias, which the An-cients referred to by lesser known names than our contemporaries, to tell you, most learned patron, truthfully about these and many other things contained in the Sarmatias [in Sarmatiis]. I write to you briefl y, my dearest master and patron, as the topic demands, and will make sure [curabo] to encourage others, who have discovered greater things to write more freely and in more elegant words. Just as the Portuguese king discovered the Southern Hemisphere with peoples adjacent to the ocean as far as India, so the Polish king shall venture into the northern hemisphere and reveal and illuminate, through the discoveries undertaken by means of military campaigns and wars, peoples oriented toward the east living close to the northern ocean.60

Here, Miechowita establishes an analogy between the discoveries of India and the Southern Hemisphere by the Portuguese king (referring to Manuel I) and, as Miechowita hopes, the new territorial discoveries of northeastern Europe under the aegis of the Polish king (Sigismund I). Miechowita suggests that Sigismund I venture into and disclose (aperta) the hitherto unexplored North-ern Hemisphere by means of military campaigns and wars (per militia et bella). Like the Portuguese king61 who discovered and colonized the South-ern Hemisphere, Sigismund I will thus illuminate (clarescat) the Northern Hemisphere, inhabited by peoples bordering on the northern ocean facing the East, in order to make it accessible to the world (mundo pateat). Miechowita’s


use of a wide range of verbs that denote openness,62 such as the participle “ap-erta” or the verbs “clarescat” and “pateat,” gestures toward the discovery and disclosure of the Northern Hemisphere, beyond the present boundaries of Po-land.63 Miechowita’s powerful geostrategic positioning of the Polish king as a discoverer of new territories—by translating the vertical Ptolemaic landscape into a horizontal and traffi cable territory—created, for the fi rst time, a larger European awareness not only of the geography but also of the geostrategic po-tential of Europe’s East.

From Maciej Miechowita to Abraham Ortelius

Yet despite the manifold editions and translations of Miechowita’s new reading of Ptolemy, the myth of the Riphean Mountains persisted in the imaginary of Renaissance cartographers. Abraham Ortelius’s 1570 Th eat-rum orbis terrarum, considered to be one of the fi rst atlases, is a powerful case in point that illustrates the complex relation between early modern cartogra-phy and the translation and visualization of ancient geographic sources.64 While Ortelius relies on sources such as Miechowita and dismisses the Riphean Mountains from his maps, a mountain range still occupies the northeastern part of the oikoumene, east of Tartaria, at the borders of the “Oceanus Sciticus.” Ortelius names this mountain range the “Orbis zona montes”65 (Figure 12) or the “Zona mundi montes.”66

Th e Riphean Mountains have disappeared in name only: a generic mountain chain now takes their place as a remnant of a fading yet persistent Ptolemaic geography. But here the “natural” mountain chain has been transformed into an artifi cial and symbolic, rather than eff ective, marker of boundaries. At the same time, the divergent cartographic nomenclature as-sociated with the mountainous zone, which oscillates between “orbis” and “mundus,”67 gestures toward early modernity’s multiple—and confl icting—epistemological frameworks and its wavering mapping and irresolute naming of the “world.”

While the name of the Riphean Mountains has vanished from the map proper, it persists in the Album amicorum written for Ortelius by several of his friends with the purpose of chronicling and commenting upon the cre-ation process of his Atlas. Th ese comments and testimonies off er a look not only into the workshop of a famous Renaissance cartographer, but also into the


etymology of the noun théatron (theater) and the verb théaomai (to see, look), especially in the context of the new territorial discoveries. One commentator, Pietro Bizzarri, writes that Ortelius has brought to light a territory that many people had ignored and that has now been made visible to everyone.68 For Jean-Marc Besse, a “new visibility of the world” emerged precisely with Ortelius,69 whose entourage found that accurate vision and visualization off ered a new way of representing the world in its totality. Even the title of Ortelius’s work, Th eatrum, turns the focus onto the etymological meaning of “theatron” as

Figure 12. Detail: Orbis Zona Montes. Abraham Ortelius. Antwerp, 1570. Th eatrum Orbis Terrarum. Harvard University Map Collection, Pusey Library.


vision and visualization. Yet a careful reading of other contributions to the Album shows that this new visibility and process of visualization were still obscured and obstructed by readings drawn from ancient geographical sources. Th us the antiquarian Cornelis Claesz Van Aecken from Leiden can note:

Who would deny that you [Ortelius] have mastered all the sci-ences? You certainly have mastered all those pertaining to the lands. What could be more famous than your world, which you dared sus-pend on a thin paper, after having it cut into gores [= sectors of a map’s curved surface] on several maps, so that what had previously been unknown, and what one could enjoy up till now only as if through a sort of haze, has been proposed to the eyes, to the senses of humans? Th is very universe is accessible by the virtue and the genius of your Th eater from the rise of the sun to the Sea of Azov; one can traverse it beyond the occidental isthmus, to the Riphean and Hyperborean Mountains.70

For Van Aecken, Ortelius’s “genius” consists in his ability to present the world in such a way that the boundary separating the onlooker and the cartographic representation disappears. In a crossing of empirical and fi ctional boundar-ies, this newly discovered world itself becomes accessible to the readers of the atlas in the form of a sequence of regional maps71 and comprehensible in its globality and universality, all the way from the west to the Riphean and Hyperborean Mountains. What might surprise, however, is Van Aecken’s choice of topographic examples to help the reader visualize the widening extent of the world in an age of territorial “discoveries.” Instead of citing territories dis-covered by his contemporaries, Van Aecken hearkens back to the imaginary and mythical places described by Greek and Roman geographers. Th e world he describes is indebted to Ptolemy more than to Magellan, in stark contrast to the topography of the already known and circumnavigated world. Van Aecken’s reference to the Riphean Mountains reveals the slow, nonlinear pro-cess of implementing, applying, and expanding early modern cartographic knowledge. It also sheds light upon Van Aecken’s doubt about cartography as a new science whose task it was to translate ancient geographic knowledge into early modernity. What Van Aecken seems to underscore in his comment is, instead, cartography’s performativity, its ability to represent and visualize the world as a theatron of nonknowledge.


In one of his works on early modern cartography, Tom Conley states:

[New historicists] ask how the “world” could be both imagined and experienced when its boundaries were expanding at exponential rates. Cartographic studies have shown where the unknown, vital for any defi nition of consciousness or even the drives of life itself, was located and bracketed. Th e unknown was an integral part of cartography prior to the eighteenth century. But to assert, as many have, that car-tography sought to contain the unknown within the terrae incogni-tae it indicated on its maps does not solve the relation of the discipline with the unknown. Evidence shows how much in the early modern age the unknown inhabits most written and schematic representa-tions of the world. Unnamed patches that we retrieve on maps printed in the sixteenth century prompt reverie of spaces that can be fancied as unknown by virtue of the maps themselves.72

Although the world was potentially known and navigable in its entire exten-sion since its circumnavigation by Magellan in 1519–22, cartographers and hu-manists continued to depict the Riphean Mountains on maps and to describe them in geographic texts as a way of indicating the remaining areas of non-knowledge. Th e Riphean Mountains powerfully reveal that several topographic “patches” remained unnamed or were misinterpreted on early modern maps even after Magellan. Early modern cartography was composed of “reveries of spaces” creating visualized fi ctions based on ancient geographic knowledge in an age of territorial discoveries. For J. P. Harley, who describes “mapping and silencing knowledge on maps” as an “active human performance,”73 carto-graphic activity involved the translation, visualization, and representation not only of knowledge, but also, as for Conley, of nonknowledge. In Harley’s view, the consciously inserted lacunae and topoi of nonknowledge from Hom-er’s Odyssey to early modern cartography can be understood as a complex and nonlinear interaction between geographic knowledge and nonknowledge, where “silence and utterance are not alternatives but constituent parts of map language, each necessary for the understanding of the other.”74

Th e complex interaction between knowledge and nonknowledge, concret-ized in the creation of early modern maps, is a process of translation. As the case of the impossible translation and repeated visualization of imaginary mountains shows, the Riphean and Hyperborean Mountains revealed the per-sistence of nominal and spatial mistranslation. One might ask whether fi cti-


tious mountains are not bearers of an additional translational dimension, serving as tokens that facilitate cartographic translation by rendering chaotic landscape more comprehensible and thus meaningful. In his “Essai de géog-raphie physique” (1751), the French geographer Philippe Buache advanced the theory that a mountain range spans the entire globe, enclosing it like an exo-skeleton, partly under sea level, partly in the shape of dispersed islands. Th e cultural geographer Bernard Debarbieux argues that Buache’s insistence on this chain of mountains is an “expression of his desire to fi nd order in this apparent disorder, and to identify some principles by virtue of which natural objects may hold together. Th e theory of the continuity of mountain ranges rests upon these assumptions. It treated mountains analogically as a kind of framework, which [Buache] envisages as the support for diff erent parts of the terrestrial globe and which is formed of high ranges encompassing and cross-ing it.”75 Th ese visualized mountain chains serve as systems for organizing objects in space. Th ey are not empirical objects that can be represented and measured scientifi cally. Rather, they function as conceptual frameworks and theoretical constructs that help translate and visualize knowledge. Th us, for Debarbieux, “Buache’s system is therefore fi rst and foremost a logical order-ing of natural objects in space, objects which are organised into reasonably simple and complementary categories.”76

In his early essay on uninhabited islands, Gilles Deleuze compared islands with mountains. For him, islands are mountains set in bodies of water, while mountains are islands on dry land. Both islands and mountains are not pri-mary original sites, created by God, but sites created by the human imagina-tion. Th ey constitute sites of a second origin:

Th e island, and all the more so the deserted island, is an extremely poor or weak notion from the point of view of geography. Th is is to its credit. Th e range of islands has no objective unity, and de-serted islands have even less. . . . Th e essence of the deserted island is imaginary and not actual, mythological and not geographical. At the same time, its destiny is subject to those human conditions that make mythology possible. Mythology is not simply willed into exis-tence, and the peoples of the earth quickly ensured they would no longer understand their own myths. It is at this very moment litera-ture begins. Literature is the attempt to interpret, in an ingenious way, the myths we no longer understand, at the moment we no lon-ger understand them, since we no longer know how to dream them


or reproduce them. Literature is the competition of misinterpreta-tions that consciousness naturally and necessarily produces on themes of the unconscious, and like every competition it has its prizes.77

For Deleuze, there are no maps without an imaginary element—a desert island or an unknown mountain—which serve as productive nuclei of carto-graphic productions and translational activities. Here, literature becomes an attempt to interpret and translate “myths we no longer understand.” No won-der, then, that the Riphean Mountains have not entirely vanished from our maps. While twenty-fi rst-century GIS-based digital mapping leaves little space for cartographic nonknowledge on our globe, the Riphean Mountains have undergone a translatio from the earth to the moon. Th e “Montes Riphaeus, or the Riphaean Mountains” is now the name for “an isolated range on the Oceanus Procellarum, the Ocean of Storms. Running in a north-south di-rection these low peaks are not particularly high, the tallest is just short of being 1 mile above the plain.”78 Th e isolated and island-like Riphean Moun-tains continue to function as a productive source of spatial translations and cartographic visualizations. Th ey serve as a mobile limes, now transported to the moon. As such, they help to chronicle the complex boundaries between knowledge and nonknowledge, charting the intrinsic relationships among cartography, translation, and visualization in an age of digitalization.

Notes to Pages 73–78 283

39. On Charles’s macaronics, see John Fox, “Glanures,” in Charles d’Orléans in Eng-land, 1415–1440, ed. Mary-Jo Arn (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2000), 89–108. Charles d’Orléans, father of Louis XII, was held prisoner in England for twenty-fi ve years after the battle of Agincourt. During his captivity he wrote French lyrics and also some sixty-fi ve hundred lines of skillful English poetry, now MS Harley 682, the fi rst single-author English lyric sequence. A large, bilingual (French-Latin) vellum codex, Grenoble MS 873, was made by his secretary Astesano; on MS 873, see A. E. B. Coldiron, Canon, Period, and the Poetry of Charles d’Orléans: Found in Translation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 112–44.

40. Archibald, “Tradition and Innovation,” explores the medieval poetic backgrounds and the macaronics of Skelton and Dunbar, creating a taxonomy of how English me-dieval macaronic verse works (p. 18). Her four categories are Latin refrains or burdens; regularly alternating Latin lines, half-lines, or stanzas; randomly inserted Latin words, phrases, or lines; and blocks of Latin lines that do not conform to a standard verse pat-tern. Th e English medieval macaronic tradition also includes prose, songs, and verse, and a thriving line of Latin-English sermons, aimed, according to Wenzel, Macaronic Sermons, at a late medieval bilingual discursive community (see “Bilingualism in Action,” 105–29, on the status of late medieval Latin and English).

41. “Th e Mediated Medieval and Shakespeare,” in Shakespeare, Pasts and Presents, ed. Helen Cooper, Peter Holland, and Ruth Morse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Like much early printed translation, macaronics raise questions of periodiza-tion, a separate topic.

42. Trotter, Multilingualism; Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, ed., Language and Culture in Medieval Britain (Woodbridge, UK: York Medieval, 2009). On the aureate line, Archibald (“Tradition,” p. 130, n.12) reminds us that Patrick Diehl “sees aureation as a natural de-velopment from macaronic verse: ‘As the vernaculars sought to make themselves as much a grammatical as Latin, it was natural that they should move from juxtaposing Latin with themselves to an eff ort to annex it’ (p. 166),” citing Diehl, Th e Medieval European Reli-gious Lyric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

43. Marie Hause, however, fi nds that they do not turn up much in the Private Li-braries in Renaissance England.

44. Full discussion of the patterns of printing and translation that reveal the founda-tional foreignness of English literary nationhood is beyond my scope here but forms the subject of my Printers Without Borders: Translation and Textuality in Renaissance England (Cam-bridge University Press, 2015). A version of this chapter will appear in part there.

4. Erroneous Mappings

1. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press / Loeb Classical Library, 1942), book 4, paragraphs 88–89, 186–88.

2. In his book on Renaissance translation theory and practice, Włodzimierz Olszaniec calls the Renaissance an “epoch of translations” (epoka przekładów). Włodzimierz Olszaniec,

284 Notes to Pages 78–79

Od Leonarda Bruniego do Marsilia Ficina: Studium renesansowej Teorii i Praktyki Prze-kładu (Warsaw: Instytut Filologii Klasycznej UW, 2008), 22.

3. Tom Conley argues that “writings can be called ‘cartographic’ insofar as tensions of space and of fi guration inhere in fi elds of printed discourse.” Tom Conley, Th e Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (Minneapolis: University of Min-nesota Press, 1996), 3.

4. See Riccardo Maisano and Antonio Rollo, eds., Manuele Crisolora e il ritorno del greco in Occidente (Atti del convegno Internazionale, Napoli, 26–29 giugno 1997) (Naples: n.p., 2002).

5. See Mariarosa Cortesi, “La tecnica del tradurre presso gli umanisti,” in Th e Clas-sical Tradition in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Manuscript Discoveries, Circulation and Translation, Proceedings of the First European Science Foundation Workshop on “Th e Reception of Classical Texts,” Florence, June 26–27, 1992, ed. Claudio Leonardi and B. Munk Olsen (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 1995).

6. Ptolemy’s Geography circulated in Arabic translations throughout the Middle Ages, and Arab and Muslim scholars and navigators created Ptolemy-based maps much earlier than their European counterparts. For a modern edition, see Ptolemy, Geography, trans. Joseph Fischer, ed. Edward Luther Stevenson (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2011). For the theoretical chapters of the Geography, see J. Lennart Berggren and Alexander Jones, eds., Ptolemy’s Geography: An Annotated Translation of the Th eoretical Chapters (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). Chrysoloras most probably bequeathed the manuscript of Ptolemy’s Geography to his former student Pala Strozzi upon his death in 1415. Paul Botley, Latin Translation in the Renaissance: Th e Th eory and Practice of Leonardo Bruni, Giannozzo Manetti, and Desiderius Erasmus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 14 [note].

7. Th e author of numerous books on astrology, astronomy, cosmology, and geogra-phy, Ptolemy was known in medieval Europe for his Almagest, a description of the heavens, and Tetrabiblos, a tract on astrology. His treatise on optics was known “only sporadically in the fi fteenth century and was quickly eclipsed by the more theoretically exhaustive theories of Al-Hazen.” See Sean Roberts, Printing a Mediterranean World: Florence, Constantinople, and the Renaissance of Geography (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2013), 21.

8. David Woodward, Maps as Prints in the Italian Renaissance: Makers, Distributors and Consumers (London: British Library, 1996), 15.

9. In John W. Hessler, A Renaissance Globemaker’s Toolbox: Johannes Schöner and the Revolution of Modern Science, 1475–1550 (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 2013), 31.

10. According to Paul Botley, “in October 1405, in a letter to Niccoli from the papal court at Viterbo, Bruni recorded his intention to prepare a version of Ptolemy’s Geographia. He asked Niccoli to send him the Greek text and that part—eam particulam—which Chrysoloras had already translated. In fact Jacopo Angeli, who had had a Greek manu-script of the work since 1400, eventually completed the translation [no later than 1409].” Botley, Latin Translation in the Renaissance, 13–14.


11. See Sebastiano Gentile, “Emanuele Crisolora e la Geografi a di Tolomeo,” in Dotti bizantini e libri greci nell’Italia del secolo XV (Atti del Convegno Internazionale, Trento, 22–23 ottobre 1990), ed. M. Cortesi and E. V. Maltese (Naples: D’Auria Editore, 1992), 307.

12. See James Hankins, “Ptolemy’s Geography in the Renaissance,” in Th e Marks in the Fields: Essays on the Uses of Manuscripts, ed. Rodney G. Dennis and Elizabeth Falsey (Cambridge, Mass: Houghton Library Department of Printing, 1992), 118–27. Reprinted in Hankins, Humanism and Platonism in the Italian Renaissance, vol. 1, Humanism (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2003), 457–68. Future references to this book are from this edition.

13. While it is not entirely clear why Bruni abandoned this particular translation proj-ect, it is well known that Bruni and Angeli were competing for the position of apostolic secretary to Pope Innocent VII—a post that Bruni won after a literary contest with his rival Angeli. Bruni’s letter to Niccoli shows, according to Paul Botley, that “shortly after taking up his new position in the papal court, and with his command of Greek now as-sured, Bruni was looking for a substantial text to Latinise.” Botley, Latin Translation in the Renaissance, 13–14.

14. Today the manuscript is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at Harvard University, Houghton Library, MS Typ 5. For a description of the manuscript see Hankins, “Ptole-my’s Geography in the Renaissance,” 457.

15. Ibid., 459.16. Ibid., 458–59.17. “Vt autem ea quae ab illo absoluta diuino quodam ingenio sunt cum nostris etiam

habeatur, in latinum ipsa curaui transferre sermonem.” 1v–2r. See ibid.18. Ibid., 459.19. Hankins, “Chrysoloras and Humanism,” 246.20. Th e maps were added, as James Hankins observes, “through the combined ef-

forts of Francesco di Lapacino and Domenico di Lionardo Boninsegni, both members of the circle around the bibliophile Niccolò Niccoli.” Hankins, “Ptolemy’s Geography in the Renaissance,” 458. It was specifi cally in Florence that the development of techniques to represent three-dimensional space on two-dimensional surfaces and to construct Ptole-maic mapmaking models fi rst began to thrive.

21. Samuel Y. Edgerton and other scholars have argued that the Florentine cartogra-pher Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, a close associate of both Brunelleschi and Alberti, was the person most likely to have introduced the Florentine artists to Ptolemy’s techniques. Edgerton, “Alberti’s Colour Th eory: A Medieval Bottle Without Renaissance Wine,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 32 (1969): 109–34. Quoted in Hankins, “Ptolemy’s Geography in the Renaissance,” 460–61.

22. Roberts, Printing a Mediterranean World, 22.23. See ibid., 23–24. Roberts notes that “Popes Sixtus IV and Alexander VI, Fed-

erico da Montefeltro, the Medici, Matthias Corvinus, and the Angevin kings of Naples all possessed manuscripts of the Geography produced by Florentine scribes and illumina-tors.” Ibid., 23.


24. While most scholars consider the Codex Vaticanus Urbinas Graecus 82, today in the Vatican Library, as the primary source for research on the Geography, the so-called Codex X from the second half of the thirteenth century, known as the Vaticanus Graecus 191, “is of particular signifi cance, because it contains many local names and coordinates that diff er from the other manuscripts mentioned above, and which cannot be explained by mere errors in the tradition. Unfortunately, none of the coordinates from . . . this co-dex were ever copied.” Florian Mittenhuber, “Th e Tradition of Texts and Maps in Ptole-my’s Geography,” in Ptolemy in Perspective: Use and Criticism of His Work from Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century, ed. Alexander Jones (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), 96.

25. Mittenhuber, “Texts and Maps in Ptolemy’s Geography,” 104.26. Jonathan M. Bloom, “Lost in Translation: Gridded Plans and Maps Along the

Silk Road,” in Th e Journey of Maps and Images on the Silk Road, ed. Philippe Forêt and Andreas Klapony (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 90.

27. Ibid.28. Ibid.29. Ibid., 90–91.30. Ibid.31. Nicolaus Germanus also created lavish maps for the fi rst Italian translation, in

verse, of Ptolemy’s Geography by Francesco Berlinghieri, Septe giornate della Geografi a (Th e seven days of Geography), written in terza rima and published in 1482 in Florence. See Roberts, Printing a Mediterranean World, 25.

32. According to Ptolemy, “European Sarmatia is terminated on the north by the Sar-matian ocean adjoining the Venedicus bay and by a part of the unknown land. . . . Th e terminus of Sarmatia, which extends southward through the sources of the Tanais river is 64° 63°. It is terminated in the west by the Vistula river and by that part of Germania ly-ing between its source and the Sarmatian mountains but not by the mountains them-selves. . . . Sarmatia is divided by other mountains, which are called Peuce mountains . . . , Amadoci mountains . . . , Bodinus mountains . . . , Alanus mountains . . . , Carpathian mountains as we call them . . . , Venedici mountains . . . , Ripaei.” Ptolemy, Geography, trans. Edward Luther Stevenson, book 3, chap. 5, 79.

33. Ancient geographers and historians thought that rivers necessarily had sources beneath mountains. Aristotle thus defi ned mountains not only as a natural boundary in themselves, but also as a site generating rivers, which, in turn, function as natural mark-ers of territorial divisions. Already the Greek historian Hecataeus of Miletus located in Periegesis the sources of rivers beneath the Riphean Mountains creating a powerful and authoritative hydrological and orographic landscape that persisted in time and that was considered authoritative and true until the Renaissance period. See O. A. W. Dilke, Greek and Roman Maps (London: Th ames and Hudson, 1985), 57. According to Marica Mila-nesi, the ancient belief that rivers necessarily originate beneath mountains was challenged only in the eighteenth century. For Renaissance geographers, “big rivers emptying into the Northern coast of the Black Sea had to originate in large lakes or preferably in big and faraway mountains. Until the nineteenth century, no Mediterranean people conceived of the origin of a river—be it big or small—diff erently. It was only Alexander von Hum-


boldt who, upon his return from the plains of the Orinoco, demonstrated, around 1820, that a big river can also originate in the imperceptible undulations of a plain.” Marica Milanesi, “Il confi ne degli Urali: Un’invenzione geopolitica,” Limes: Rivista italiana di geo-politica 1 (1994): 110. My translation.

34. Maciej Miechowita, Chronica Polonoru[m] (Kraków: Hieronimus Wietor, 1519).35. Miechowita’s Tractatus was published in 1583 in the second volume of Giovanni

Battista Ramusio’s Navigazioni e viaggi in an Italian translation by Annibal Maggi. See Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 6 vols., ed. Marica Milanesi (Turin: Ein-audi, 1978–88).

36. Th e Tractatus was printed in Latin in 1517, 1518, 1521, 1532, 1537, 1542, 1555, 1582, 1588, and 1600. It appeared in German translation in 1518 and 1534 and in Polish in 1535, 1541, and 1545. It was published in Italian in 1561, 1562, 1584, 1606, and 1634, and in Dutch in 1563. See Marshall T. Poe, “A People Born to Slavery”: Russia in Early Modern European Ethnography, 1476–1748 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000), 37. Th e Dutch trans-lation of Miechowita’s treatise is included in Die Nieuwe Weerelt der Landtschappen ende Eylanden, die tot hier toe allen ouden weerelt bescrijveren onbekent geweest sijn, trans. Cor-nelis Ablijn (Antwerp: Van der Loe, 1563), a Dutch translation of Simon Grynaeus and Johann Huttich’s travel anthology Novus orbis regionum (1532), where Miechowita’s trea-tise had already been published.

37. Hajdukiewicz contends that Głogow’s commentary contains references to Bra-zil. I was unable to fi nd Głogow’s specifi c references to Brazil or the New World more generally. See Leszek Hajdukiewicz, Biblioteka Macieja z Miechowa (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy Imienia Ossolińskich, 1960), 152, and Elizabeth Armstrong, Before Copyright: Th e French Book-Privilege System, 1498–1526 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 190.

38. See Franz Laubenberger, “Th e Naming of America,” Sixteenth Century Journal 13, no. 4 (1982): 91–113.

39. Furthermore, Wapowski contributed to the 1513 Strassburg Waldseemüller edi-tion of Ptolemy’s Geography. Czesław Chowaniec points out that “Wapowski arrived [in Rome] in 1505 from Bologna. . . . He stayed for several years at the court of the Holy See, where, about 1506, he worked at his map of the Jagellonian States, making of course use of Cardinal Nicolas de Cuse’s map, produced about the middle of the 15th century and printed in 1491. . . . Beneventano made the map of Central Europe using Wapowski’s MS. [manuscript] as a source of information for completing his representation of the territory of Jagellonian Poland. Waldseemüller integrally reproduced Wapowski’s map [in his 1513 edition of Ptolemy’s Geography], mechanically abridging a part of it in the west.” Czesław Chowaniec, “Th e First Geographical Map of Bernard Wapowski,” Imago Mundi 12 (1955): 63.

40. See Marco Beneventanus and Giovanni Cotta, eds., In Hoc Operae Haec Contine[n]tur Geographia Cl. Ptholemaei (Rome: Per Bernardinu[m] Venetu[m] De Vitalibus, 1507).

41. Stobnica’s volume also contained an abridged version of Piccolomini’s De Asia, Isidore’s Sirie compendiosa descriptio, Paulus Osorius’s Africe brevis descriptio, and Anselm’s Terrae sancte & Urbis Hierusalem apertior descriptio. See Jan ze Stobnicy, Introductio in


Ptolomei Cosmographiam cum longitudinibus & latitudinibus regionum & civitatum celebri-orum. Epitome Europe Enaee Silvii (Kraków: Hieronim Wietor, 1519). For information about the New World available in Poland in the fi rst decade of the sixteenth century, see Janina E. Piasecka, “Polskie zabytki geografi czne dotyczące Ameryki,” Czasopismo geo-grafi czne 63, no. 1 (1992): 85–90.

42. “Ptolomeo aliisque vetustioribus ignotas”; Jan ze Stobnicy, fol. 5. “Epitoma Eu-rope Enee Silvii, paucis quibusdam in ea de partibus nostrae Sarmaciae immutatis”; Ze Stobnicy, Introductio, fol. 5.

43. “Ptolomeo aliisque vetustioribus ignotas”; Ze Stobnicy, Introductio, fol. 5. “Epit-oma Europe Enee Silvii, paucis quibusdam in ea de partibus nostrae Sarmaciae immuta-tis”; Ze Stobnicy, Introductio, fol. 5.

44. For a detailed description of Waldseemüller’s map, see John W. Hessler, Th e Nam-ing of America (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 2008), esp. 18–25.

45. Marica Milanesi prefers the term “synthetic map,” since “the term transition im-plies the existence of a unidirectional fl ow from one condition to another (for instance, from ancient to modern), and thus a progression or regression which is not recognisable in the history of ancient cartography.” Marica Milanesi, “A Forgotten Ptolemy: Harley Codex 3686 in the British Library,” Imago Mundi 48 (1996): 45. For the term “transitional map” see David Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” in Th e History of Cartography, vol. 1, Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, ed. J. B. Harley and D. Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 286–370, esp. 314.

46. Milanesi, “Forgotten Ptolemy,” 45.47. Hessler, Renaissance Globemaker’s Toolbox, 59.48. “Trium insuper partium terre priscis note cognitionem Ptolomeus tradidit in 26

tabulis, quarum decem sunt Europe, quattuor Aff ricae & uodecim Asiae,” Ze Stobnicy, “De Partibus Terrae,” n.p.

49. “Alia quarta pars ab Americo Vesputio sagacis ingenii viro, inventa est, quam ab ipso Americo eius inventore amerigen quasi americi terram sive americam appellare vol-unt”; Ze Stobnicy, “De Partibus Terrae,” n.p.

50. Piccolomini’s De Europa was fi rst published in a critical English edition by Nancy Bisaha in 2013. See Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, Europe (c. 1400–1458), trans. Robert Brown, intro. and annotations by Nancy Bisaha (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of Amer-ica Press, 2013).

51. “Apenninus Italiam omnem intersecat, illic per Histriam & Dalmaciam usque in Peloponesum & in Th raciam altissima iuga decurrunt, et inter Rhenum ac Danubium dorsum assurgit, quod ex Alpibus derivatum per Germaniam Sarmaciamque dilapsum, supra fontes Tanais ad Rhypheos montes attingit & per illos Caucaso iungitur ex inde per Caspium Antitaurum denique Taurus ipse comprehenditur. Ultra quem regnare magnum Antiochum Romani permisere, ex quo fi t ut totius continentis una montium series intel-ligatur, quamvis plerisque in locis tumor non satis appareat”; in Ze Stobnicy, Introductio, fol. 26v. See also Piccolomini, Cosmographia Pii Papae in Asiae & Europae eleganti descrip-tio, ed. Geoff roy Tory (Paris: Apud Collegium Plesseiacum, 1509), 5.


52. Hessler, Renaissance Globemaker’s Toolbox, 19. On Johann Schöner’s 1515 globe, see Chet van Duzer, Johann Schöner’s Globe of 1515: Transcription and Study (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2010).

53. “Montes Alpium tres ramos extendunt. Quorum primus per Sveviam, Boemiam, Slesiam, usque Poloniam extenditur, ubi Carpatus, lingua vero vernacula Krumpach di-citur, & sic continuando progreditur per Russiam, ubi Rhipheus dicitur perpetuo vento-rum fl atu gaudens.” Th e second ramifi cation of the Alps extends “per Helvetiorum territorium,” and the third is the Appeninus, which traverses Italy. See “De Europeae provintiis,” in Schöner, Cosmographia (Nuremberg: Johannes Stuchssen, 1515), fol. 18.

54. Maciej Miechowita, Tractatus de duabus Sarmatijs Asiana et Europiana et de con-tentis in eis (Kraków: Johannes Haller 1517), n.p.

55. In a reference to Miechowita, who had derived the toponym “Polonia” from pole, the Polish word for fi eld, Abraham Ortelius opens his description of Poland by claiming that “Polonia, quae a planitie terrae, (quam ipsi vernacule etiamnum Pole vocant) nomen habet, vasta Regio est.” Abraham Ortelius, Th eatrum orbis terrarum (Antwerp: Aegidius Coppenius Diesth, 1570), 44.

56. Siegmund von Herberstein, Rerum Moscovitarum comentarii (Vienna: n.p., 1549).57. Before von Herberstein, the Swedish bishop and geographer Olaus Magnus, whose

brother Johannes corresponded with Miechowita immediately after the publication of the treatise, relied on the Tractatus for his in-depth description of northern Europe, Sea Map and Description of Northern Regions (1539). See Poe, “A People Born to Slavery,” 33.

58. See Konstanty Zantuan, “Th e Discovery of Modern Russia: Tractatus de duabus Sarmatiis,” Russian Review 27, no. 3 (1968): 328.

59. I do not concur with Zantuan, for whom Miechowita’s Tractatus signifi es “a vic-tory of Renaissance empirical experience over the traditional classical knowledge.” Zan-tuan, “Discovery of Modern Russia,” 330.

60. “Quare ut haec & complura alia in Sarmatijs contenta, tue doctissime presul am-plitudini vera veraciter enarrarem. Subsequentem tractatum de duabus Sarmatijs ab anti-quoribus minus cognitis nominibus, quibus temporibus nostris nominantur. Tibi domino et patrono meo semper colendissimo, scribere breviuscule, ut res expostulabit, ad incitan-dum alios, qui maiora noverunt, & elegantiori stilo scribere facile poterunt curabo. Utque sicut plaga meridionalis cum gentibus adiacentibus oceano usque ad Indiam, per regem Portugalie patefacta est, Sic plaga septemtrionalis cum gentibus oceano septemtrionis im-minentibus, & versus orientem spectantibus, per militia et bella regis Polonie aperta, mundo pateat et clarescat”; Miechowita, Tractatus de duabus Sarmatiis, dedicatory epistle to Stanislaus Turzo, n.p. My translation.

61. Manuel I (1469–1521), king of Portugal 1495–1521.62. In the quoted passage earlier, Miechowita uses three other words, besides aperta,

that denote disclosure and openness: patefacta, aperta, pateat, and clarescat. Patefacio means “to make visible, reveal, uncover, lay bare,” “to make or lay open, to open,” and, more specifi cally, “to open the way as a discoverer or pioneer; to be the fi rst to fi nd.” Pateo denotes “to stand open, lie open, be open,” especially in the context of doors, gates, and buildings. It


further means “to stretch out, extend; to be accessible, attainable.” Of a road and of a space, it signifi es “to off er unimpeded passage” and “to extend in space, stretch or spread out.” See Oxford Latin Dictionary, 1996, s.v. “patefacio,” and Harper’s Latin Dictionary (New York: American Book Co., 1907), s.v. “patefacio” and “pateo.”

63. Interestingly, in his later “Discorso sopra varii viaggi per li quali sono state con-dotte fi no a’ tempi nostri le spezierie e altri nuovi che se potriano usare per condurle,” Giovanni Battista Ramusio would take up Miechowita’s focus on Europe’s northeast and discuss how traditional passages to India “by way of the Red Sea” [“per la via del mar Rosso”] have been foreclosed. Alluding to the rise of the Ottoman Empire and the “great transformations of both religions and Signorie” [“mutazioni grandissime e delle religioni e delle signorie”] in recent history, Ramusio emphasizes the potential of Europe’s and Asia’s north to guarantee the fl ow of intercontinental transactions and the transfer of merchan-dise. While the Portuguese, a constant reference for Ramusio, have chosen to take “la via del ponente, circondando tutta l’Africa, per la virtu e industria de’ gran capitani delli serenissimi re di Portogallo,” the hitherto foreclosed Northern Hemisphere could be opened up for the European navigators. In this endeavor, the Polish king would have a clear advantage. See Ramusio, “Discorso,” in Navigazioni e viaggi, ed. Marica Milanesi, vol. 2 (Turin: Einaudi, 1978–88), 981–82.

Sebastian Münster and Abraham Ortelius relied on Miechowita’s specifi c informa-tion about Europe’s East when publishing the Cosmography (1544) and the Th eatrum orbis terrarum (1570), respectively. Th e atlas of the “geographicus regius,” as Ortelius was named by the Spanish king Philip II, was a major cartographic work, continuously expanded, updated, and translated into numerous European languages.

64. Ortelius does not mention the Riphean and Hyperborean Mountains, and when quoting his sources for his information on Poland, Russia, Lithuania, and Tartaria, Or-telius explicitly mentions Miechowita: “You [reader] have a lot about these regions from Maciej Miechowita, in his book on the Sarmatias, in Albert Krantz’s description of Van-dalia, and [Antonio] Bonfi ni’s De rebus Hungaricis [= Hungaricarum Rerum Decades]. Yet everything has been best described by Marcin Kromer in his Chronica Poloniae and in Sigismund von Herberstein’s [Rerum] Moscoviticarum commentarii. See also Sebastian Münster.” “Plura habes de his Regionibus apud Mathiam à Michou, in libello de Sarmatiis, Alb[ertum] Crantzium in descriptio Wandaliae, Bonfi nium de rebus Hungaricis. Sed omnium optime eas descripsit Martinus Cromerus in Chronico [sic!] Poloniae, & Sigis-mundus ab Herberstain in suis Moschoviticis Commentariis. Vide & Seb[astianum] Mun-sterum.” Ortelius, Th eatrum, 44.

65. Ortelius, Th eatrum, n.p.66. Ibid.67. Th e divergent use of the words “orbis” and “mundus” in early modern cartogra-

phy and literature is the focus of Ayesha Ramachandran’s forthcoming book, “Th e World-makers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe” (Chicago: Th e University of Chicago Press, 2015), forthcoming.

68. Abraham Ortelius, Album amicorum [facsimile], ed. Jean Puraye (Amsterdam: A. L. Van Gendt, 1969), fol. 70v.


69. Jean-Marc Besse talks about a “visibilité nouvelle du monde.” Jean-Marc Besse, Les grandeurs de la Terre: Aspects du savoir géographique à la Renaissance (Lyon: ENS Édi-tions, 2003), 274.

70. Quoted in ibid. My translation.71. As Van Aecken argues, one no longer needs to travel around the world: a careful

look at Ortelius’s cartographic Th eatrum provides the same sensations and pleasures as circumnavigating the globe. See Besse, Les grandeurs de la Terre, 275.

72. Tom Conley, “Putting French Studies on the Map,” Diacritics 28, no. 3 (1998): 23–24.

73. J. P. Harley, “Silences and Secrecy: Th e Hidden Agenda of Cartography in Early Modern Europe,” Imago Mundi 40 (1988): 58. Already Homer’s description of Odysseus’s meandering itineraries constituted a cartography marked by nonknowledge, especially if one focuses on Odysseus’s proper name, which in Greek means “no one.” As Michel Serres has argued, “nemo” turns into “the subject of knowledge, the subject of the voyage.” Mi-chel Serres, “Jules Verne’s Strange Journeys,” Yale French Studies 52 (1975): 181.

74. Harley, “Silences and Secrecy,” 58.75. Th e skeleton was a popular simile from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment

period to describe the continuity of mountain chains. In his entry for “mountain” in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopedia (vol. 10, 1751–65, 672), D’Holbach argued that mountains can be compared to bones, since they bear the world just as bones support the human body. See Bernard Debarbieux, “Mountains: Between Pure Reason and Embod-ied Experience,” in High Places: Cultural Geographies of Mountains, Ice and Science, ed. Denis Cosgrove and Veronica della Dora (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), 93. See also Bernard Debarbieux and Gilles Rudaz, Les faiseurs de montagne: Imaginaires politiques et territorialités, XVIIIe–XXIe siècle (Paris: CNRS, 2010).

76. Debarbieux, “Mountains,” 93.77. Gilles Deleuze, “Desert Islands,” in Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974,

trans. Michael Taormina (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), 10–12.78. Don Spain, Th e Six-Inch Lunar Atlas: A Pocket Field Guide (Dordrecht: Springer,

2009), 199.

5. Taking Out the Women

1. Anne Lake Prescott, “Th rough the Cultural Chunnel: Th e (Robert) Greeneing of Louise Labé,” in Opening the Borders: Inclusivity in Early Modern Studies; Essays in Honor of James V. Mirollo, ed. Peter C. Herman (Newark: University of Delaware, 1999), 133.

2. See Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes: La littérature au second degré (Paris: Seuil, 1982), translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky as Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), ix.

3. Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision,” in On Lies, Se-crets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 35; quote

early modern cultures of translation...happy race of people called the hyperboreans, who live to...

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