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Outer Worlds and Inner Worlds: An Introduction to World Maps
From: The British Library
| By:
Peter Whitfield |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Maps are magical and mysterious objects. While they may give the impression of objectivity, they are invariably subjective--and to unlock their meanings we need to understand them in their contemporary contexts. On the occasion of the exhibition "Lie of the Land: The Secret Life of Maps" at The British Library, Peter Whitfield introduces the complexities of world maps and suggests how, in addition to geographical outlines, they reveal the traces of power and politics, religion, culture and, often, individual obsession. |
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| A medieval image of the earth, from an early fifteenth century manuscript of L'Image du Monde by Gautier de Metz. | |
 othing is definable unless it has no history." Thus Nietzsche crushed the ambitions of the cultural historian who claims the ability to rationalize and interpret the past. Maps of the world have a recoverable history of more than 2,000 years, and there is no meaningful definition that would cover all of its images. The reasons why the world map took the forms that it did, the psychological processes that created it, are ultimately hidden from us. |
Maps are cultural artefacts, comparable in history perhaps to arms and armour, or musical instruments, or ships. Almost all cultures have developed these things, but with enormously varying degrees of sophistication. Their origin is instinctive, in that they are products of both the intellect and the imagination confronting problems in reality. They have faced severe practical constraints in their construction and their use, but they have evolved because they were of fundamental importance. They have acquired an aesthetic dimension, and their forms have been influenced by art, imagination, symbolism as well as by empirical knowledge. The historian can take account of these interacting forces and try to analyse the way in which they have shaped the evolving world map. But the history of mapping, like the history of most things, it is not a science: it can describe but not ultimately explain. |
The shaping of science and culture
The technical means by which the earth has been explored and measured is one aspect of the history of maps.  In one sense the history of the world map is clearly an account of geographical progress, of the dialogue between mapmakers and reality. The most striking fact of that dialogue is that the world map represents a reality which, although present to our senses, is perpetually out of reach. The scientific means by which that problem has been solved deserves a technical history in its own right. But the world map has always been shaped not by science alone but by religion, politics, art and obsession. |
Themes such as divine power, the natural elements, secular ambitions, recur constantly and express more than pure geography. These influences have been at times conscious, at times unconscious. Throughout the greater part of history the sources of knowledge lay in inherited authority and beliefs, not in reason or experience, and these sources have left their imprint unmistakably on the world map. Moreover the forms in which even scientific knowledge is expressed are constantly evolving, mirroring the societies from which they spring. |
World maps are rooted in the history which they help us to create; therefore they must often be interpreted in language which their contemporaries would not have recognized. This approach carries a danger that haunts all historians of ideas: the temptation to demythologize or decode the past.  If everything is culturally relative, nothing is what it seems, and everything must be interpreted by the use of subtle intellectual keys. Such an approach becomes self-defeating if it distances us from the mind of the past, and demonstrates merely the mind of the present. It is important to attempt to interpret maps as historical documents whose contemporary context is essential to their understanding. In particular the principle of subjectivity in maps, both personal and cultural subjectivity, needs to be emphasized as an analytical key. There is a natural assumption that maps offer objective descriptions of the world. They do not, and the innumerable ways in which they do not, serve to place maps as central and significant products of their parent cultures. |
Subjectivity carries the implication of freedom, imagination, almost perhaps of play--elements whose role in mapmaking has not been sufficiently recognized. The richest and most revealing world maps are those which are the least self-conscious. The impulse to depict the world on paper has always been associated with the desire to make some statement about the world. These statements have been intuitive, and frequently expressed in symbolic form, but in essence they are statements about man's belonging in the world, and about his ability to understand or master his environment. World maps often record, inadvertently, the systems of belief and knowledge which enabled him to achieve this. |
If one had to choose the single most telling motif, constantly recurring in countless world maps over the centuries, it is that of power, the controlling powers that shapes the world's features and history. That power may be religious--Christian or pagan. It may be secular--conquest, trade or empire. It may be conceptual--the world map as a navigational instrument or as a thematic document. Or it may be scientific--cosmological or seismic. It is when these themes are unselfconsciously expressed that the world map receives most clearly the intellectual imprint of its time. |
Imperatives to innovation
'Paradise is now shut and locked, barred by angels; so now we must go forward, around the world, and see if somehow, somewhere there is a way back in.'
Heinrich von Kleist, 1811 |
It is the sense of not belonging, not recognizing in the received world map the lineaments of one's own age, that has led to perpetual innovation in world mapping, as each age has redefined its sources of knowledge and authority. That knowledge has become progressively more impersonal, setting up a tension with the intuitive, poetic impulse within mapmaking. This is the meaning of Kleist's ironic insight that, expelled from paradise by knowledge and self-consciousness, we must travel around the world, and try to find a back door into Eden. We attempt this, metaphorically, by exploration and the making of new maps. The great problem with the modern world map, especially since Kleist's day, is that the diversity of knowledge has created a multiplicity of world maps, from which we must choose the image of reality with which we feel at home. We can no longer simply relocate paradise from one part of the world to another, as the medieval mapmakers did. |
It is self-evident that the only true and accurate map of the earth is a three-dimensional globe, yet mapmakers have persistently striven to re-create the world on paper. Why? This question goes to the heart of the history of the world map: the desire to see an image of the entire world focused before us, clear, self-contained, comprehensible and masterable. Attempts to resolve this paradox have been distilled over the years in a cartographic language, which like all languages involves symbolism. Sometimes that symbolism has been calculated and lucid, sometimes it has been intuitive and unspoken. The task of the map historian is to describe and interpret the development of that language, and relate it to other forms of creative expression. |
The elusive character of maps, their twin roots in reality and imagination, their distorting and yet revelatory quality, were all recognized by one of the great medieval mapmakers, Fra Mauro, and his words are no less valid to the writer of histories than to the maker of maps: |
'If anyone considers incredible the unheard-of things I have set down here,
let him do homage to the secrets of nature, rather than consult his intellect.
For nature conceives of innumerable things, of which those known to us are
fewer than those not known, and this is so because nature exceeds understanding.' |
The exhibition 'Lie of the Land: The Secret Life of Maps' is at The British Library, London, until 7 April 2002. |
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