• Europe's confused transmutation: the realignment of moral cartography in Juan de la Cosa's Mappa Mundi (1500)

    Author(s):
    James Smith (see profile)
    Date:
    2014
    Group(s):
    History, Medieval Studies, Religious Studies
    Subject(s):
    Sixteenth century, Seventeenth century, Intellectual life, History, Middle Ages
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    America, early modern Europe, european history, identity, intellectual history, 16th century, Early Modern, Intellectual history, Mapping, Medieval
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M60J3S
    Abstract:
    Following the voyages of Christopher Columbus, John Cabot, Alonso de Ojeda and Amerigo Vespucci in the last decade of the fifteenth century, the New World of the Americas entered the cartographic and moral consciousness of Europe. In the 1500 mappa mundi of Juan de la Cosa, navigator and map-maker, we see Europe as a hybrid moral entity, a transitional blend of the medieval and the modern at the crossroads between two mappings of Europe. This paper argues that the Juan De la Cosa map represents a blurred transition between map-making traditions and a mixed moral rhetoric of European identity. The De la Cosa map operates across two sets of imagined axes: held horizontally, the map is set to a Ptolemaic grid with Europe straddling the Prime Meridian, and yet when held vertically it presents a medieval moral continuum in which the Americas occupy an ascendant position, a verdant new Jerusalem in contrast to the Babylon of the Old World. Europe is both drawn to the centre of a new world order, and also pushed to the moral margins in an echo of the medieval mappa mundi still imperfectly resolved.
    Metadata:
    Published as:
    Journal article    
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    6 years ago
    License:
    All-Rights-Granted
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