Katharina N. Piechocki is associate professor of comparative literature at Harvard. Thus Cartographic Humanism: The Making of Early Modern Europe is less a work of cartographic history than it is a deep dive into what she calls several times “prose cartography” (70, 104, 109). Piechocki holds that Renaissance humanism and cartography developed in tandem during the exploration of the “other” world by Europeans, which enabled these scholars to think in terms of continents and develop an idea of European difference. She writes that these scholars, “all embarked on an unprecedented endeavor to grasp a substantially changing world by calibrating the creation of continental borders against the backdrop of an expanding Europe” (24), a process she calls, in her own coinage, europoiesis (12, 231).

Such linguistic and conceptual leaps may garner approving nods from lit-crit academics of a postmodernist/poststructuralist bent (Foucault, Derrida, Mignolo, and others of their ilk are approvingly quoted and cited throughout), but they are tougher for historians to accept. For example, Piechocki claims at one point (115) that by joining a book about Europe and a book about Asia in one volume with the title Cosmographia in Asiae & Europae eleganti descriptione, “Tory forces the reader to halt before the toponyms displayed in the title and therefore contemplate the fine continental line emerging within the Eurasian territory.” Piechocki does not explain how she can know with such certainty that a mere title forced the early modern reader to both halt and contemplate the very borderlines she thinks they should be contemplating. In another place (145), Piechocki asserts that the Greek myth of the rape of Europa is illustrative of a “(male) desire… to stake out virgin territory” and the “cartographer’s desire to mark territory in female shape/form,” rather than just a tale of lascivious Zeus tailored to lusty Hellenic listeners. In her conclusion, like in her introduction, Piechocki proposes an interesting thesis: that Europe “was in the making in the early modern period” (231) and it was “propelled by the emergence of a novel humanistic discipline: cartography” (232). The arcane literary analyses she performs on bits of humanist texts, coupled with jargon-laden terminology and opaque syntax so beloved of literary theorists, do not really prove that intriguing thesis. The idea of Europe and continental difference can be found in maps, geographical writings, and even in poems and fictional works of the period without such convoluted contentions. ( )