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Mapping Literature: Cartography in the World Literature Classroom

Jane M. Kinney
Valdosta State University

The impulse to map spans almost all of human history and most cultures, including preliterate and indigenous cultures. As Dennis Reinhartz and Judy Reinhartz point out, "Maps are texts and artifacts, landmarks of human achievement, that can be used to let students re construct the past. Maps summarize the scientific, technological, intellectual vigor of an era, and they document the political, economic, social, and aesthetic and artistic values of the times in which they were created" (88-89). Literary critic Sylvi a Tomasch argues further that maps also create reality:

Like other technological systems, cartography is also strongly and inevitably ideological: it involves not merely the drawing of maps but the making of worlds. Maps are not just colo rings in of preset outlines or simple depictions of portions of the physical universe. Maps present entire world views, with all that that phrase implies in terms of philosophical or scientific outlook, theological import, political influence, aesthetic perspective, and artistic choice. The multifarious worlds cartographers draw are far more than merely passive reflectors of particular cultural circumstances or idiosyncratic renderings of some otherwise objective reality; rather, maps are among the most powerful statements of belief in the worlds that they help to create. They are tools, to be sure, but they are inscriptive tools that allow as well as necessitate perspective; they are tools without which we cannot read and without which we cannot see. (66)

But while often used in the study of history, sociology, and other social sciences, maps are not often used in the literature classroom. Yet maps, especially historic maps, can be valuable aids in helping students unde rstand the cultural and historical context of literature. While maps are spacial documents, they also seek to answer visually many of the same questions that literature does: who are we, where do we come from, and what is our world like? And the impuls e to map is, in western cultures at least, as old as the impulse to express the human condition in literature. As cartographer J. B. Harley notes:

As mediators between an inner mental world and an outer physical world, maps are fundamenta l in helping the human mind make sense of its universe at various scales. Moreover, they are undoubtedly one of the oldest forms of human communication. . . . The map is thus both extremely ancient and extremely widespread; maps have impinged upon the li fe, thought, and imagination of most civilizations that are known through either archaeological or written records. . . . The significance of mapsand much of their meaning in the pastderives from the fact that people make them to tell other people about the places or space they have experienced. (Harley and Woodward 1: 1)

In the modern world, we have come to view maps as fact, as impersonal technological productions of great accuracy. But maps can and should be read in mu ch the same way as literature is readquestioning the underlying assumptions, the cultural and individual biases, and the purposes for which they have been created. "As images they evoke complex meanings and responses and thus record more than factual in formation on particular events and places" (Harley and Woodward 1: xv). For example, the maps of the world most often used in American schools show the American continents in the center; while such a focus may be normal, given the audience, it also reve als a western biaspushing the other continents to the edges and subconsciously inculcating the mental image of America as the major focus of world politics, economics, and so on. Such biases are inherent in almost any map; maps cannot by their very natu reexpressing on a flat surface a spherical object, reducing a very large surface to a very small scalebe true. Mapmakers have to make choices of what to put down, where to put it, and how to represent it, and so bias, whether conscious or no, is inevit able. Thus, "reading" maps, looking for the underlying assumptions guiding the maker, becomes important and can be very enlightening.

Historic maps in particular can reveal much about cultures separated from us by many centuries, a nd as such they can be very helpful in understanding the literature produced by these same cultures. Because historic maps look different from modern maps, readers can grasp in a visual and often very immediate way the differences and similarities betwe en their own understanding of the world and that of the earlier culture that produced the maps. This understanding can be very valuable in the world literature classroom, where students often have difficulty in accepting other than in a superficial way t he fact that the people of other, earlier cultures, although human, perceived their world in sometimes radically different ways than do we.

A course in western world literature before 1700 is common in many college curricula. Wit h the growing emphasis on cultural diversity in the college, such a course can be used to make the students aware of literature as cultural document, a record of the thoughts and beliefs of a particular people living in a particular place and time. But w hile students will acknowledge the differences between themselves and the peoples of an earlier culture in terms of religion, society, and cosmology, they do so superficially; as a consequence, they often persist in judging these earlier cultures by their modern cultural yardsticks. They will read avidly the stories of the ancient Greeks and Romans and their gods, for example, but fail to grasp the idea that the ancient peoples could possibly believe in a religion whose gods would behave in such an immo ral or human way. Discussion of the issues does help, but other means of helping the students to understand these cultural differences can be brought into the classroom: pictures of sculptures of ancient Greek gods and goddesses; portraits of the peo ple named in Castigliones The Courtier; a medieval painting of Dantes Inferno; pictures of the Sutton Hoo discoveries; a musket ball made by one of Cromwells soldiers; and so on. These aids help the students "realize" the people or chara cters in the works of literature, and they also often stimulate class discussions.

Modern maps of ancient sites can assist the students to develop a sense of place for the cultures they study. Such maps often help them follow the eve nts in epics like the Iliad or the Odyssey, as well as to see where these civilizations were in relation to each other. They can discuss, for example, the fact that the ancient Hebrews and the Muslims lived in desert places, which helps to explain the significance of water as an important, often sacred symbol. Or they can see how the growth of Islamic territories in medieval Europe helps to explain why the Saracens become the villains in works such as The Song of Roland.

But historic maps, especially world maps, can show how a culture envisioned its world and the place of humans within it. A medieval mappamundi, for example, is a graphic representation of medieval religious and philosophic beliefs, per haps even more than a representation of reality. In the mid-thirteenth century Ebstorf map (Fig. 1), Christs head is on top of the world, His feet at the base, and His hands at either side; Jerusalem, designated by a drawing of the Resurrection, is in the center of the world and thus also at the center of Christ Himself. Paradise, with Adam and Eve, the Tree of Knowledge, and the Serpent, appears immediately to the left of Christs head, which is the easternmost point of the map. The map is achronistic: Biblical places and eventsthe Flood, the parting of the Red Seaare realized here, right alongside the names of contemporary villages in Germany. Further, the map shows mythical beasts and the "monstrous races" of Plinys Nat ural History and other early works. As P. D. A. Harvey points out, we should not "be misled . . . into supposing that learned persons in the thirteenth century thought of the world as a flat disc with Jerusalem in its centre" (Mappa Mundi 21) ; most of western Europe knew long before Columbus sailed that the world was in fact a sphere. But the Ebstorf map and others like it were displayed in churches or cathedrals, painted on walls in palaces, and used primarily "to instruct the faithful abou t significant events in Christian history rather than to record their precise location," according to David Woodward; "In medieval religious life, a mappamundi might stand as a representation of the world, for the transitoriness of earthly life, t he divine wisdom of God, the body of Christ, or even God himself" (Harley and Woodward 1:286, 290).

Such a map is a good visual complement to Dantes Inferno. Students can seein perhaps much the same way as a medieval person di dthe medieval Christian concept of the world as divine and divinely controlled, literally in Christs hands and thus under His control. They can see the literal understanding of biblical events through their placement on a map of the earth alongside med ieval structures and towns. They can see the pilgrimage as a way for humans to connect with this biblically focused world. They can also see, through the inclusion of the fantastic, the fact that the earth was still a place of marvels, a place where mons ters and miracles were still imaginable if not probable, a world in which the things envisioned by Dante for his Inferno were frighteningly believable.

Finding maps to complement works of literature from the ancient western world is a more difficult matter. Maps were often made on perishable materials, so it isnt surprising that few maps survive from classical times. There are a few, however, and there are reconstructions from classical writings on geography as well. While interpre tation of the early maps that survive is highly speculative, they can still be useful as a means of suggesting differing world views to students.

One of the oldest surviving maps is known as the Babylonian world map (Fig. 2), dated ca. 600 B.C.; the map is in the shape of a star, with Babylon at the center, and each of the rays of the star represents a region beyond the ocean circling Babylon where "various legendary beasts" lived and where only a few ancient heroes were reputed to have gone (Harley and Woodward 1: 111). This map has been reconstructed and its text translated, so it is easy to bring into the classroom for discussion. Given its date and its text focusing on the ancient heroes who went beyond the ocean to fight legendary beasts, it works well with the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Standard Version of which was established in the mid-seventh century B.C. and which has a hero who ventures out to places far away to fight against fantastic creatur es and to establish a name for himself. Further, the maps circular structure with Babylon at the center and the encircling ocean can be compared to the maps from subsequent western cultures, which have similar features but which replace Babylon with Jer usalem or Mecca as the center of the inhabited world, depending on which culture produced the map, thus showing continuity of ideas between the early western peoples.

Other reconstructions of early maps can also enhance the students experience of the texts. For example, the shield of Achilles is the earliest literary reference for cartography in ancient Greece (Harley and Woodward 1: 131). Homers description of the shield made by Hephaestus is "a poetic expression of macrocosmic/m icrocosmic beliefs, held by a society seeking to reconcile a general view of the universe with mans activity in it" (Harley and Woodward 1: 132); the description is so detailed that students can attempt to draw it themselves. But a comparison of Homers description of the shield (or the reconstruction provided in Malcolm Willcocks Companion to the Iliadsee Fig. 3) with a reconstruction of the world according to Hecataeus (fl. 500 B.C.), Greek historian and statesman, shows similarity of shape and concept (Fig. 4). To drive home the idea of the Roman Empires vastness and its corresponding sense of its own importance, students can view a reconstruction of a map of the inhabited world from the work of St rabo, a contemporary of Augustus Caesar, the emperor for whom Virgil wrote the Aeneid. In this map (Fig. 5), reconstructed from Strabos directions of how the description of the known world should be compiled, the world extend s from Spain in the west to India in the east, and from the northernmost reaches of Europe to the Arabian peninsula in the south. When students compare the boundaries of the Empire (taken from a modern map such as that provided in the expanded edition of the Norton Anthology of World Masterpiecessee

Medieval maps are better known and understood than the classical. The mappaemun di such as the Ebstorf map discussed above exist in a number of shapes, sizes, and variations, almost all fascinating and useful for discussion of medieval literature. The itinerary of Matthew Paris, a monk at St. Albans in the thirteenth century, is a beautiful road map of the route for pilgrims to important religious places in England and the continent. It is a very good illustration for the importance of the pilgrimage in medieval life and thus for the study of The Canterbury Tales. There are also zone maps (Fig. 8) divide the inhabited world into three continentsAsia, Africa, and Europeseparated by the Mediterranean (the base of the T, s eparating Europe from Africa) and the rivers Don and Nile (the crossbar of the T, separating Europe and Africa from Asia). The three continents of the inhabited world also contain the names of the sons of NoahSem (Shem), Cham (Ham), and Iafeth (Japhet) who were to repopulate the world after the Flood, according to the account in Genesis. This, like the mappaemundi, demonstrates the medieval Christian attempt to take biblical narrative as fact, but one can also look ahead to the troubles that the "discovery" of another continent (with more peoples on it) would causethere is no mention of it in the Bible, and Noah had only three sonsso the new continent shakes up the neat patterns of the world as presented by the medieval maps. New maps and ne w ways of viewing the world are required.

With the Age of Discovery and the advent of the printing press, maps become more widespread in use in the western world; they also become more scientific and "modern." Showing a chronological series of maps from the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries can illustrate the way in which European conceptions of the world are radically and steadily altered by exploration and encounters with other cultures. The images of God or Christ no longer appear, for example, except in cosmographical diagrams such as those found in Renaissance Bibles (see Fig. 10). Entitled "A New Mapp of the World," the map shows a world very familiar to modern readers in many respects: two hemispheres are s hown, with the familiar lines of latitude and longitude and with the continents in fairly modern shape with the exception of North America, which is missing much of its northwestern portion; Australia, which is still vague in its southern and eastern reac hes; and Antarctica, which is not shown at all. At the four corners of the print, the peoples of the four main continents are represented. The Europeans, in the top left corner, are represented by a man in ermine robes, wearing a long curly wig and hold ing a cane; a woman, also in ermine robe and wearing what appears to be a crown on her head; and a younger woman and a small boy, both elegantly dressed, apparently the offspring of the nobleif not royalcouple. The people of Asia are more exotic, weari ng long robes and more ornate headdresses than the Europeans, but the man, the focal point of the group, looks across towards the European group. The Africans, in the lower right corner, are quite European in dress and appearance, although the woman reve als one leg, and the group appears to have fewer symbols or trappings of authority than do the Europeans. The Americans, in the lower left corner, also look European but are wearing short skirts and headdresses of feathers, and the woman and child are ba re chested. Clearly the standards here, the understanding of what peoples are, are Eurocentric. The background scenes for each group are also interesting. The European landscape has people stag hunting on horseback; the Asians are engaged in man-to-man combat, also on horseback; the African scene shows a group of naked males hunting, on foot and accompanied by a centaur, although further in the background a warrior clad in robes and turban with sword raised rides a rearing horse away from a grazing ele phant; three of the Americans appear to be kneeling by a flaming frame, while another runs toward them, carrying a bow, and yet another walks away with spear in hand.

Taken together, the images included on this map show European conce pts of other peoples and, tacitly, of their own superiority: all the peoples shown have essentially European features, but the Africans and Americans are less well dressed and have strange beasts and customs. It is the Europeans who have pride of place, who wear and display the symbols of power (ermine robes, the crown, a scepter upraised in the womans hand, etc.) and who stand atop the western hemisphere, thus visually controlling the New World and the peoples below; they apparently are also more civil ized than the barbaric fighting Asians and the naked pedestrian hunters in the African scene. One could easily use this map to introduce discussions of the expanding knowledge and horizons of the western world, but also the growth of imperialism and the remnants of the strange and marvelous that still exist (the centaur pictured in Africa).

This map was published shortly after Miltons Paradise Lost, and the picture of the Americans recalls the lines from Book IX when, afte r describing how the newly fallen Adam and Eve make themselves garments from fig leaves, Milton compares them to Americans:

Such of late
Columbus found th American, so girt
With feathered cincture, nake d else and wild
Among the trees on isles and woody shores. (1115-18)

The map is a wonderful illustration of the Renaissance as an era connected to both the modern and the medieval and classical worlds.

There are several good sources of maps and information on them, although there is little written on how to teach maps in the literature classroom. Much of the pedagogy focuses on using maps in more traditional settingselementary and high school socia l science coursesand for more traditional reasonsto understand concepts of scale, projections, and the basics of map reading. But for use as a supplement to the literature, the maps can be read more as cultural text, with less attention paid to their p lace in the history of maps than to their role as graphic representations of cultural assumptions, and thus do not require extensive study of the principles of cartography. A good general work for non-specialists that will provide a sense of the role of maps in western culture through history is Norman J. W. Throwers Maps and Civilization: Cartography in Culture and Society. A more specialized and more detailed (but still very accessible) discussion of historic maps will be found in The Hist ory of Cartography, a series planned to run to six volumes that is comprehensive in plan, richly illustrated, and lucidly written; the first two volumes have been published and are well worth reading. Additionally, most collections of historic mapsan d there are manyhave explanations of a maps date, maker, and cultural context.

There are many accessible sources, both scholarly and popular, for reproductions of early maps. The volumes of The History of Cartography are a good place to start, and I have included a list below of several good sources for early maps. But since historic maps make for beautiful "coffee table" books and decorations, many are available in collections of post cards and in calendars, so a look through museum g ift shops and mail order catalogues will often yield goodand inexpensiveresults. Maps are also available in slide sets from the Newberry Library and transparencies, so teachers can consider what means of classroom display are available to them and whic h they find most comfortable. The best quality is often achieved from color slides, but photocopies and transparencies can be more practical.

Integrating maps into the literature classroom can be done in a number of ways, depending upon the size of the class, the equipment available, and the desired result. In my own classes, I have used the maps individually as discussion aides and subjects for group analysis, posing basic questions such as:

  1. What is recognizable on th e map? What does this map have in common with other maps studied?
  2. What are the dominant features? What conclusions can be drawn from these features as to what is important to this culture?
  3. What conclusions can be drawn about the cultureits beliefs, its knowledge of the world, etc.?
  4. How does the map illustrate concepts or beliefs from the literature?
  5. What purpose does the map seem to serve?

Another way to use historic maps is in an introductory exercise, giving groups of students three or four world maps from various cultures and asking them to develop a list of questions that they have about those cultures that produced them. The groups can also trace common elements (shape, content, figures, decoration) and identify distinctive ones in the maps. Such an exercise will start the students thinking about culture and cultural diversity before they begin to read the literature, and it also can introduce them to the concept of analysis and the various ways in whic h one reads a text. When the maps reappear individually and in conjunction with particular works of literature, students can then focus on how the map reflects the context of the literature as well as how the literature illuminates the map.

Maps in the world literature classroom can greatly enhance the experience of the literature. J. B. Harley notes that maps

share many common concerns with the study of the book, exhibiting a textual function in the world. . . . Maps are a graphic language to be decoded. They are a construction of reality, images laden with intentions and consequences that can be studied in the societies of their time. Like books, they are also the products of both individual minds and the wide r cultural values in particular societies. ("Text" 4)

The reading of historic maps requires many of the same skills as does the reading of literature. Also, both maps and works of literature are products of artists and crafts men, who are concerned about conveying truths about humans, their place in the universe, and their values, with skill and beauty. Thus, studying maps and literature together can enrich the understanding of the works themselves as well as of the cultures t hat produced them.

Works Cited

Danzer, Gerald A. "Images of the Earth in Three Early Italian Woodcuts." Hermon
Dunlap Smith Center Occasional Paper #5. Chicago: The Newberry Library, 1991.

Delano-Smith, Catherine, and Elizabeth Morley Ingram. Maps in Bibles 1500-1600.
Geneva: Librairie Droz S. A., 1991.

Harley, J. B. "Text and Contexts in the Interpretation of Early Maps." From Sea
Charts to Satel lite Images: Interpreting North American History through
Maps. Ed. David Buisseret. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990. 3-15.

, and David Woodward, eds. The History of Cartography. 6 vols. Chicago:
U of Chicago P, 1987-.

Harvey, P. D. A. Mappa Mundi: The Hereford World Map. Toronto: U Toronto
P, 1996.

. Medieval Maps. Toronto: U Toronto P, 1991.

Mack, Maynard, et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces.
Expanded ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces.
6th ed. Vol. 1. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992. 2179-219.

Rein hartz, Dennis, and Judy Reinhartz. "How Wide the World : Geography,
Maps, and the Teaching of American History." OAH Magazine of History
7.3 (Spring 1993): 21-26.

Shirley, Rodney. The Mapping of the World: Early Pri nted World Maps,
1472-1700. London: The Holland Press, 1983.

Tomasch, Sylvia. " Mappae Mundi and The Knights Tale: The Geography of
Power, the Technology of Control." Literature and Technology.
Ed. Mark L. Gre enberg and Lance Schachterle. Bethlehem: Pittsburgh
UP, 1992. 66-98.

Unger, Eckhard. "From the Cosmos Picture to the World Map." Imago
Mundi 2 (1937):1-7.

Virgil. The Aeneid. Trans. Robert Fitzger ald. The Norton Anthology
of World Masterpieces. 6th ed. Vol. 1. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992.
844-917.

Willcock, Malcolm M. A Companion to the Iliad. Chicago: U Chicago P,
1976.

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Illustrations

Figure 1.The Ebstorf World Map. In P. D. A. Harvey,
Medieval Maps (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1991).

Figure 2. Reconstruction of the Babylonian World Map. In Ec khard
Unger, "From the Cosmos Picture to the World Map," Imago Mundi 2 (1937).

Figure 3. Reconstruction of the Shield of Achilles. In The History
of Cartography, vol. 1, ed. J. B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1987).

Figure 4. Reconstruction of the World According to Hecataeus. In
History of Cartography, vol. 1, ed. J. B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago:
U of Chicago P, 1987).

Figure 5. Reconstruction of the Inhabited World According to Strabo.
In The History of Cartography, vol. 1, ed. J. B. Harley and David Woodward
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987).

Figure 6. The Extent of the Roman Empire. In Norto n Anthology of World
Masterpieces, expanded ed., vol. 1 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995).

Figure 7. Zone Map from Macrobius In Somnium Scipiones. In Gerald A.
Danzer, "Images of the Earth on Three Early Italian Woodcuts," Hermon Dunlap
Smith Center Occasional Papers #5 (Chicago: The Newberry Library, 1991).

Figure 8. T-O Map from Isidore of Seville s Etymologiae. In Gerald A.
Danzer, "Images of the Earth on Three Early Italian Woodcuts, " Hermon Dunlap
Smith Center Occasional Paper #5 (Chicago: The Newberry Library, 1991).

Figure 9. Map of Eden from 16th Century English Bible. In Catherine Delano-Smith
and Elizabeth Morley Ingram, Maps in Bibles 1500-1600 (Geneva: Librairie Droz
S. A., 1991).

Figure 10. "A New Mapp of the World" by Robert Greene. In Rodney Shirley,
The Mapping of the World: Early Printed World Maps, 1472-1700 (London:
The Holland Press, 1983).

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A Bibliography of Suggested Sources of Maps

The following list is by no means exhaustive; merely it lists those sources which I have thus far found most helpful and/or available.

Brice, Wil liam C., ed. An Historical Atlas of Islam. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1981.

Buisseret, David, and Gerald A. Danzer. Discovering Western Civilization through Maps
and Vie ws. New York: Harper Collins, 1991.

Bunbury, Edward Herbert. A History of Ancient Geography among the Greeks and
Romans from the Earliest Ages till the Fall of the Roman Empire. 2nd ed. 2 vols. 1883.
Introd. W. H. Stahl. New York: Dover, 1959.

Campbell, Tony. < I>Early Maps. New York: Abbeville Press, 1981. Danzer, Gerald A. "The Earliest World Map." Social Education 55 (Sept. 1991): 304-06. . "The First Printed World Map." Social Education 55 (Oct. 1991): 355-57. . Philosoph y Behind a Map: Macrobius, 1483 A.D. Social Education 56 (Mar. 1992): 145-48. . Ptolemys Map of the World, 1478 A.D. Social Education 56 (Jan. 1992): 16-19.