Sean Roberts - Printing a Mediterranean World [2013][A]

Book Description
In 1482, the Florentine humanist and statesman Francesco Berlinghieri produced the Geographia, a book of over one hundred folio leaves describing the world in Italian verse, inspired by the ancient Greek geography of Ptolemy. The poem, divided into seven books (one for each day of the week the author “travels” the known world), is interleaved with lavishly engraved maps to accompany readers on this journey.
Sean Roberts demonstrates that the Geographia represents the moment of transition between printing and manuscript culture, while forming a critical base for the rise of modern cartography. Simultaneously, the use of the Geographia as a diplomatic gift from Florence to the Ottoman Empire tells another story. This exchange expands our understanding of Mediterranean politics, European perceptions of the Ottomans, and Ottoman interest in mapping and print. The envoy to the Sultan represented the aspirations of the Florentine state, which chose not to bestow some other highly valued good, such as the city’s renowned textiles, but instead the best example of what Florentine visual, material, and intellectual culture had to offer.

Reviews
"Scrupulously researched and engagingly written, Printing a Mediterranean World is a wonderful addition to the Anglophone literature about Renaissance intersections between print and geography. By virtue of its precise focus on just one text, it is able to unpick simplistic narratives told at these intersections and give us a more nuanced, ambivalent reading of the role of Renaissance geography in any putative trajectory towards the present day."
Robert Mayhew - Society and Space

"Roberts' fine title, Printing A Mediterranean World, is a book that may seem a specialist effort--but it is one that will change the way you look at your world, the world and worldly ways."
Randall Fleming - Morningside Park Chronicle

"Roberts elegantly written discussion reveals the importance of Berlinghieri's finely-crafted book as, at once, an object of politics and cultural status, Florentine skill in bookmaking, Europe's intellectual reach, a statement about Ottoman power, and expression of the mutual benefits of trade and geographical knowledge for the Ottomans and the Florentines...Modern understanding of the geography of the Renaissance will be enlivened by this authoritative book about the authority invested in books."
Charles WJ Withers - Cultural Geographies

"Earlier studies by Bronwen Wilson, Joseph Monteyne, and Rose Marie San Juan have offered trenchant investigations into the role of print in making manifest cosmopolitan cities in the early modern world such as Venice, London, and Rome, respectively. Roberts's lucidly written account seeks to work on a larger scale, choosing the 'Mediterranean world' as his unit of analysis."
Lisa Pon - Council for European Studies: Reviews and Critical Commentary

"Roberts's account of Berlinghieri's intellectual biography is informed and rewarding. It uncovers the distinctive quality of fifteenth-century geography, and reveals the characteristic combination of classical geography, mythology, medieval history and legend found in The Seven Days of Geography...This book has a good chance of becoming a classic on the subject."
Alessandro Scaffi - The Times Literary Supplement

Through Berlinghieri's The Seven Days of Geography (1482), Roberts provides a highly original focus on the book as material artifact and contests prevailing views of its place in the history of geography and cartography. Most compellingly, his account of the book as a cultural go-between leads to a critique of models of Italian–Ottoman exchange current in early modern studies over the past decade. (Stephen Campbell, John Hopkins University)

Through his meticulous study of Francesco Berlinghieri's Geographia, Roberts deftly touches on some of the most timely and topical areas of recent research in the field of early modern studies: Artistic agency, materiality, patronage, print culture—and the nature of 'the Renaissance' itself. (Giancarlo Casale, University of Minnesota)

Roberts’s account of Berlinghieri’s intellectual biography is informed and rewarding. It uncovers the distinctive quality of fifteenth-century geography, and reveals the characteristic combination of classical geography, mythology, medieval history and legend found in The Seven Days of Geography. His discussion of the Renaissance reinvention of Ptolemaic mapping reflects his awareness of the recent paradigm shift in the history of cartography and of science. The old progressivist vision of history and universal concept of objectivity has no place in Sean Roberts’s exposition. This book has a good chance of becoming a classic on the subject. (Alessandro Scafi Times Literary Supplement 2014-03-21)

About the Author
Sean Roberts is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Southern California.