Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Renaissance, Discovery, and the Written Word: Influences on Sixteenth-Century Geography
- 2 The Classical Revival and the New Geography
- 3 Defying the Limits of the World: Frigid and Torrid Zones in Sixteenth-Century Geography
- 4 Dispelling the Boundaries of the World: Ocean from Confine to Means of Communication
- 5 Balance and Opposition: the Physical Structure of the World
- 6 A Parallel World: Harmonia Mundi, Connection and Separation in the Western Continent
- 7 Moving Boundaries: The Monstrous and the Marvellous
- Conclusion: A World Made for Humans
- Bibliographies
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Renaissance, Discovery, and the Written Word: Influences on Sixteenth-Century Geography
- 2 The Classical Revival and the New Geography
- 3 Defying the Limits of the World: Frigid and Torrid Zones in Sixteenth-Century Geography
- 4 Dispelling the Boundaries of the World: Ocean from Confine to Means of Communication
- 5 Balance and Opposition: the Physical Structure of the World
- 6 A Parallel World: Harmonia Mundi, Connection and Separation in the Western Continent
- 7 Moving Boundaries: The Monstrous and the Marvellous
- Conclusion: A World Made for Humans
- Bibliographies
- Index
Summary
This is clear, said the mariners, that beyond this Cape [Bojador] there is no race of men nor place of inhabitants; nor is the land less sandy than the deserts of Libya, where there is no water, no tree, no green herb; and the sea is so shallow that a whole league from land is only a fathom deep. The currents are so terrible that no ship having once passed the Cape will ever be able to return. Therefore our forefathers never attempted to pass it… Now what sort of a ship's captain would he be who, with such doubts placed before him by those to whom he might reasonably yield credence and authority, and with such certain prospect of death before his eyes, could venture the trial of such a bold feat as that?
The long sixteenth century saw the greatest single shift in European geographical knowledge and understanding that has occurred in written history. This book demonstrates how over this key period western Europeans moved from seeing the northern temperate regions of the world as the only knowable space to thinking of the world as a global unit in which God made all parts of the sphere for human exploitation and to interact with one another. In the fifth century BC the ancient Greeks had developed the idea that only parts of the world were inhabitable. This ‘inhabitable world’, termed oikoumene, in which boundaries of climate and Ocean separated the knowable regions of the earth from the rest of the sphere, became the primary model in geographical thought for more than two thousand years. The quotation above from Gomes Eanes de Zurara's Chronicle of Guinea written about 1450, at the very cusp of the period of European expansion, captures the fear with which the world beyond the oikoumene was viewed. According to Zurara, the mariners were certain that there was no point in venturing beyond Cape Bojador since neither sea nor land could support human life. Humans were confined to the oikoumene. In the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, the world came to be seen as a truly global space and the traditional boundaries of classical and medieval geographical thought were undermined. Nonetheless, ideas of inhabitability continued to dominate geographical literature throughout the sixteenth century.
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- Framing the WorldClassical Influences on Sixteenth-Century Geographical Thought, pp. 1 - 16Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2020