Printing A Mediterranean World: Florence, Constantinople, and the Renaissance of Geography. By Sean Roberts

PRINTING A MEDITERRANEAN WORLD: Florence, Constantinople, and the Renaissance of Geography. By SEAN ROBERTS, xii and 293pp.; maps, diagrs., ills., index. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 978067406648. Sean Roberts' Printing a Mediterranean World: Florence, Constantinople, and the Renaissance of Geography provides an absorbing examination of the status of geographical knowledge in the Renaissance Mediterranean world. Focusing on the production and circulation of Francesco Berlinghieri's remarkable Geographia, Roberts situates the study of geography within two of the central features of this period: the humanist restoration of knowledge of classical antiquity and the relationship between Ottoman and Italian authorities. The end result is a vivid picture of a political and intellectual culture whose engagement with geographical knowledge challenges many assumptions concerning Renaissance scholarship and early modern interactions between Muslim and Christian powers. John approaches Berlinghieri's work less as a discourse or a representation of space than as a material artifact whose multiple copies possessed distinctive significance depending on specific details of their construction and the unique contexts into which they circulated. Together, these objects served as a "connective tissue" forging a community of readers whose own experiences ascribed Berlinghieri's work multiple, often conflicting, meanings. In elaborating this vision, Roberts draws on an impressive array of analytic frameworks, deploying contemporary scholarship in anthropology, Italian literature, history of economic thought, as well as his home discipline of art history. But his guiding muse is book history, and numerous of his most penetrating insights--concerning the relationship between print and manuscript in the early days of movable type, how classical antiquity was packaged and distributed by early modern humanists, and how readers lent their own interpretations to the text --derive from questions of central importance to this field. Indeed, Roberts' insistence that modern scholars have often mischaracterized fundamental aspects of Quattrocento culture stems from his conviction that they have been insufficiently attentive to the material forms in which knowledge was constituted, a claim borne out by the unusual richness of his study. Much of the fascination of Roberts' work derives from his astute choice of subject, for Berlinghieri's Geographia is a profoundly intriguing text. Berlinghieri was a prominent figure in Quattrocento Florence, well connected to humanist luminaries like Marsilio Ficino as well as to the ruling Medici family. The work, produced from 1465-82, contained thirty-one maps nestled between a poetic reworking of Ptolemy's Geography. Dante's Inferno provided the model for the metric form, the choice of Florentine vernacular, and the conceit of the poem, in which Ptolemy whisks Berlinghieri and a companion to the skies, whence he describes the surface of the terrestrial earth. While Ptolemy's text contained unadorned lists of toponyms and his dry enumeration of cartographical method, Berlinghieri expanded descriptions of places by invoking the historical and mythological events for which they had been the setting, while the conversational form of the poem enlivens the technical discussion. The text, Roberts argues, is better thought of as an emulation of the ancient work for Renaissance purposes and in a typically Renaissance idiom rather than a translation. The various journeys of individual copies only add to the fascination of the work. While Lorenzo de Medici and Federico da Montefeltro in Urbino received luxurious manuscript copies, printed editions--often with hand-colored maps and other personalization--were circulated to prominent courts throughout Italy and beyond. Most notably, copies were sent to the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II in Constantinople and to his half-brother and would-be usurper Cem, taking refuge in Savoy. …