[Tom O'Loughlin] With me today I've got Dr David Gehring.
And David's area of expertise is the 16th century reformation.
There are umpteen aspects of
the Reformation, but one significant,
but not often studied one is
the whole role of maps and the development of mapping
in the 16th century and what it was
like to have books with printed maps in the 16th century.
David, first of all, you are welcome.
Tell us something about the significance of
cartography in the European Reformation.
[David Gehring] I like to think about cartography during the 16th
century as an indicator of a broad range
of social and intellectual developments.
And we can see the renaissance of
cartography in a lot of respects, or the revolution
of cartography as symptomatic of
a broader intellectual shift when it
comes to the recovery of the classics,
when it comes to a search for,
for new knowledge, new forms of knowledge,
this in the context of the 'age of discovery' in the 'new world,'
but then also looking back into Europe itself, right?
The discoveries (or 'discoveries' such as they were) by Europeans
down the west coast of Africa, the 'new world,'
and to the Asian sub-continent really opened up,
I think the, the European mind,
such as it may have been,
to think about the lands around them,
to think about the ways they
could chart those lands around them.
And so when I think about cartography,
map-making, and those making the maps,
those using the maps
I think it's part of the fabric of early modern society.
[Tom] And of course, there's two elements
to 16th-century map-making.
On the one hand, you've got the,
the people who were actually going down the west coast of Africa,
or going across the North Atlantic,
and they're actually drawing charts.
So there are new charts coming on the scene.
But also there is the recovery of the classical world.
There's the recovery of the geography of Claudius Ptolemy,
from the second century of the Common Era
and we don't actually know whether
originally Claudius actually drew maps,
but he gave instructions for drawing maps.
And then in the 16th-century editions,
we find the maps are drawn and they
are printed in the form that's very much like our atlas.
[David] It's a very recognizable form. That's a great point, Tom,
because we can see the maps we're so accustomed to,
to seeing now on mobile phones, on the Internet,
in the printed atlases we would
use for driving around the countryside.
They are immediately recognizable in
the 16th century in this new reform. But you're
exactly right, exactly right
about Ptolemy and the recovery of these classics.
But one of the interesting things I find
about 16th-century maps and explorers is
that the common assumption
that explorers would have
been using a lot of these printed new maps and
atlases actually falls flat.
It's amazing that although
some explorers did use maps and did draw some of their own,
they actually relied on a lot of very traditional methods.
And so when we think of the traditional methods,
thinking of word of mouth,
dead reckoning, stuff like that.
But the maps, whether they're
the Ptolemaic maps or the maps of
Abraham Ortelius and Gerard Mercator,
these have a slightly different market
and they're quite remarkable.
And I've got an example here
today that we can take a look at if we have time.
[Tom] Yeah, let's actually look at an actual map.
[David] Here we go.
[Tom] Yeah, that's, that's one of,
one of the maps of Europe
from the 16th-century printing of Ptolemy.
[David] That's exactly right. This, now this leaf is my own.
I picked it up an antiquities shop some years ago.
[Tom] One wonders how a beautiful book was dismembered to create that!
[David] Yes, I picked this one up a number of years ago.
This leaf printed in Venice,
1561 is, it's demonstrating
and you can see it's a 'table eight' Europe
and this is the area of,
of modern day Ukraine with
the Baltic to the north and the Black and Caspian seas
to the south, part of
greater Germany over this way, labelled accordingly.
But maps like this one,
the Ptolemaic recovery of
the 15th century, really helped to
spur this renaissance of map-making,
the more accurate, more recognizable forms.
But as the cartographers of the 16th century came to
realise, Ptolemy was profoundly wrong in a lot of ways.
And so one might ask, 'well,
why might it be that Ptolemy's
geography gets printed time and time again?'
Well, in a lot of ways, these are kind of curiosities.
They are maybe owned by people who want to
demonstrate their learning of the classics.
And so a book like this might not be
considered accurate for the 16th century,
but it would have been seen as
emblematic of this recovery of
the classics, the Renaissance itself.
[Tom] And I would go further.
Not only is it emblematic of recovering the classics,
but there's a new scientific vision there because of course,
Ptolemy had used a grid of latitude and longitude.
And of course, no medieval map put latitude on.
And we can see the latitudes running up the two sides.
We can see the longitude.
It starts at the canaries and runs around.
And it's running, running across from west to east.
So there's an element in which we're not only knowing,
we're not only cultured people
who are no longer in the darkness.
We have recovered the great classical source.
But we are the new scientific people who are going out
there and we are actually understanding the world.
And there's an interesting thing in that, of course,
it's just at this time that the new Protestant Bibles...
[David] yes! [Tom] ...begin to have maps.
[David] That's exactly right, yeah.
[Tom] And even though the'yre maps usually of the journeys
of St Paul or maps of the holy land,
they're maps that take over
their grids of latitude and longitude
from Ptolemy. [David] That's exactly right.
[Tom] And the Bible then is no longer in another world,
it is my world.
I can walk it, I can work it out.
It's in the same grid I'm in. [David] And seeing the holy land
in a form that might be
more recognizable when in a 21st century map
sort of way, rather than the old Mappa Mundi
seeing the medieval holy land in a certain way,
it really demonstrates how familiar
maybe the 16th century can
tend to be sometimes for us in the 21st.
[Tom] David, thank you very much for
bringing this beautiful map to our attention.
[David] You're very welcome. It's a joy to share.