Abstract
Printing a Mediterranean World is a fascinating book about a book designed to fascinate its readers, honour its recipients, and demonstrate its makers’ political acumen. In 1482, Francesco Berlinghieri, a Florentine statesman, produced the Septe Giornate della Geographia (The Seven Days of Geography), a work of world description in seven books totalling 100 folio pages, produced in Italian verse and accompanied by coloured woodcut illustrations. As its title suggests, Berlinghieri’s Geographia pays homage to the work of that title by the Ancient Greek philosopher, Claudius Ptolemy, in whose company Berlinghieri travels across the known world in the seven days or ‘books’ of the title.
Berlinghieri’s Geographia was intended as a gift from the Florentine authorities to the Ottoman Empire, specifically from the powerful Medici family to the court of Sultan Bayezid II, and, in a second gifted copy, to Bayezid’s half-brother Cem. Roberts’ elegantly-written discussion reveals the importance of Berlinghieri’s finely-crafted book as, at once, an object of politics and cultural status, Florentine skill in book making, Europe’s intellectual reach, a statement about Ottoman power, and expression of the mutual benefits of trade and geographical knowledge for the Ottomans and the Florentines. Roberts’ cross-cultural study is much more than an account of books of geography as the under-studied artefacts of Renaissance geo-politics. Printing a Mediterranean World has important historiographical dimensions, and illuminates matters of book history – specifically the relationships between manuscript and print, and questions of ‘translation’ – in ways which will interest researchers working on such matters in other regions and periods.
The historiography of (western) geography has long treated the late 15th-century ‘rediscovery’ of Ptolemy’s Geographia as something equivalent to a foundational moment; ancient ‘truths’, long neglected, could now, in translation, be brought to light and challenged, even as the near synchronous discovery of the New World profoundly altered the European geographical consciousness. Roberts offers a revisionist account of ‘the Ptolemaic Revolution’, showing how translation is insufficient to describe the complex re-making and ‘recovery’ of Ptolemy’s Geographia – he prefers ‘reconstitution’, even ‘resurrection’, both terms alluding to the complex re-working of the older work in the Renaissance. And Roberts demonstrates how Berlinghieri’s Geographia used past geographies as contemporary statements of contemporary patronage in order to secure future political connections.
This is a study of Renaissance book history with geography at its heart. It is a study of the shift from manuscript to print, but it is not simply so. Book history is shown here to be central to the webs of political influence that sustained intellectual and mercantile cultures, then more than now. The doing of Renaissance geography was rooted in local practices of craft culture which had long-distance political impact. Modern understanding of the geography of the Renaissance will be enlivened by this authoritative book about the authority invested in books.