Category: Petrarch

Geography (and a little geology) in the Anthropocene

3/24/2016

Spent a pretty fabulous morning (alas curtailed) at a cartography seminar at Harvard University’s’ Radcliffe Institute, organized by the amazing team of Tom Conley and Katharina Piechocki.

Theodore Cachey (Notre Dame) shared excellent work about the cartographic impulse in Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch. Camille Serchuck (Southern Connecticut State University) talked about the “painterly” in/of early modern maps, esp. Guillaume Le Testu’s Cosmographie, of which Frank Lestringant recently prepared an excellent edition.

My own, rather different, contribution took this form: “Early Modern Cartography in the Humanist Anthropocene-- Some Thoughts Towards some Questions,” in which I asked, in a nutshell: given that so much work on cartography, since maps stopped being considered purely “scientific” or “objective,” relies on the idea that cartography “reflects” history (Dainville), then what happens if we take Chakrabarty’s “Four Theses” seriously for the history of cartography and relate the history of cartography not only to human history but also to Deep Time? We’re so used—now—to reading humanist cartography for the way it plots, for example, empire, or discovery, or religious fantasy, but what of geological time in all this? What of the planet-as-planet? Key to such thoughts are, inter alia, Ulisse Aldrovandi who coined the term geology in 1603 (see also here).

I’m sorry to be missing the other amazing speakers who have all shaped how we understand maps: Neil Safier (of the John Carter Brown Library), Anders Engberg-Pedersen (of Empire of Chance), Marc Shell (of Islandology), Bill Rankin (see his radicalcartography), Carla Nappi, Matthew Edney, Franco Farinelli, Jean-Marc Besse (whose Grandeurs de la terre is essential for its plotting of how the oikoumene comes to be equivalent to the whole planet), and others.

Morton vs. petrarch: ecology atop a mountain

1/16/2016

Mount Ventoux (image from here)

Mount Everest, seen from path to base camp, Tibet. (Image from here)

In a part (“Tibetans in Space”) of the opening chapter to The Ecological Thought, Morton rejects localism—“Fixation on place impeded a truly ecological view” (26)—and recalls what it means to look up at the Milky Way from a Tibetan plateau, 16,500 feet above sea level: “dislocation, dislocation, dislocation” (28). What could be further from this than Petrarch’s celebrated description of his ascent of Mount Ventoux in his Epistolae familiares? Petrarch’s ascent is, as one critic put it, all about “in-sight,” i.e. about his reading Augustine’s Confessions and turning away from the mountain and the sky above to focus instead on his own interiority: “How earnestly should we strive, not to stand on mountain-tops, but to trample beneath us those appetites which spring from earthly impulses,” concludes Petrarch after reading this in Augustine: “And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not.” Petrarch’s turn inwards has gone down in history (cf. Burckhardt) as making him a “modern man.” I never really buy such “turn” moments anyway—but what we can read Petrarch as is as one who goes to the top of a mountain and does not loose himself in the ecological thought.

Geography (and a little geology) in the Anthropocene

Morton vs. petrarch: ecology atop a mountain

Project THE HUMANIST anthropocene

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Geography (and a little geology) in the Anthropocene﻿

Morton vs. petrarch: ecology atop a mountain

Project THE HUMANIST anthropocene

Categories

Archives

Related Sites

Geography (and a little geology) in the Anthropocene