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Featured Review
| Alessandro Scafi. Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2006. Pp. 398. $55.00.
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| In modern society, concepts like "Eden" and "the terrestrial paradise" are most familiar either as metaphors or as hyperbolic advertising motifs. But for more than a thousand years, the location of the Garden of Eden within the physical world was a matter of genuine concern for theologians and mapmakers. The orientation of many medieval mappae mundi placed Paradise at the very top of the world, often straddling the oceanic boundary between this world and the next. Although priorities of mapmakers—and the orientations of their maps—changed over time, the location of Eden remained an important issue. Under the influence of Jewish and Arabic scholarship, and inspired above all by the rehabilitation of Aristotle, thirteenth-century authors postulated that Paradise might be found on or beyond the equator, perhaps at the summit of a giant mountain that lifted it beyond the miasma of the postdiluvian world. By the sixteenth century, the proposition that Eden remained inviolate at the edge of the inhabited world had been rejected. Theologians increasingly accepted that the terrestrial paradise was no more, but thought that traces of the lost garden might be discovered in Mesopotamia. In support, they propounded imaginative parallels between ambiguous hydrographies of Genesis and the river systems of the Tigris-Euphrates valley. Even over the last two centuries, the search has been continued, both by Assyriologists and orientalists seeking tangible topographical connections between the literatures of the ancient Near East, and by a handful of isolated individuals driven by their own religious impulses. |
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Alessandro Scafi's stimulating overview of these varied mappings of Paradise provides a striking an invaluable contribution to the history of cartography. Ranging from the earliest maps of late antiquity to the biblical geographies of the present day, Scafi provides an exhaustive study of a fascinating phenomenon. But this is far more than a survey of scholarly esoterica. By viewing the history of cartography through these varied representations of an inaccessible utopia (and vice versa), the author provides a number of invaluable new perspectives upon an increasingly familiar body of evidence. At once an impressively detailed assessment of mappae mundi in their intellectual context, a rehabilitation of early modern religious cartography, and a valuable corrective to the surprisingly persistent view that maps can only be judged as "scientific" tools of spatial description, Scafi's study will be of interest to many AHR readers. |
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Following a short prologue on the persistent allure of Eden as a subject for cartographers, Scafi begins his survey with a discussion of the historiography of his subject. If the history of mapmaking has always fallen somewhat uneasily between the stools of history, geography, and antiquarianism—at least until the first volumes of the monumental History of Cartography (1987–) emerged under the editorial guidance of J. B. Harley and David Woodward two decades ago—the discussion of mapped paradise has been a fringe interest within a fringe interest. The physical representation of Eden on medieval mappae mundi was frequently held by the early twentieth-century historians of cartography—most famously Raymond Beazley, John Kirkland Wright, and George Kimble—as an obvious vindication of their contention that medieval mapmaking was motivated by the fabulous and frivolous rather than the scientific. The study of medieval cartography has, of course, come some way since then. Natalia Lozovsky's The Earth Is Our Book (2000) has done much to situate early medieval mapping within its intellectual context, and recent studies such as Scott Westrem's incomparable edition of the Hereford Map (2002) have laid firm foundations for future projects. As a result, the geographical knowledge of the medieval period is increasingly celebrated as a genuinely innovative synthesis of geographical, theological, and historiographical impulses. Yet in spite of this attention, Paradise itself has rarely been brought in from the edge of the map. |
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