num_pages: 224
description: From the age of antiquity to the Middle Ages scholars argued about the existence of places and perhaps peoples beyond the world known to Europeans. But to allow for the possibility of such lands and races raised troubling Was it truly impossible to reach the underside of the earth? And if so how could its inhabitants receive the word of God?In Terra Incognita  Alfred Hiatt draws on sources both literary and visual to understand the appeal of the antipodes. Examining maps and diagrams as well as evidence contained in geographical and historical works poetry travel narratives and legal documents he challenges long-standing characterizations of medieval spatiality as exclusively symbolic and religious. Instead Hiatt finds the idea of people on the other side of the Earth provided a potent and malleable symbol for political theorists satirists scholars and poetsas well as for map makers. Terra Incognita is in the end the history of a non-place of lands conjured by the scientific imagination which nevertheless drove exploration and which continued to shape the world map even as they slowly vanished from it.
language: English
title: Terra Incognita: Mapping the Antipodes before 1600
publisher: University of Chicago Press