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Chapter 1

Christians Mapping Jews: Cartography, Temporality, and the Typological Imaginary

It is the sorting out that makes the times, not the times that make the sorting.

—Bruno Latour

In a cogent essay critical of the ways in which “rationality” has become a mantra for dividing the pre-modern from the modern, Brian Stock has shown how the desire to push the boundaries of modernity either back to the Middle Ages, a modernizing tendency, or forward to later times, a medievalizing tendency, leaves untouched the multiple and syncopated linkages between rationality and its technologies—scientific instrumentation, textuality and subjectivity.¹ Bruno Latour takes Stock’s critique even further, claiming that periodization itself is the problem of the modern.² Using Boyle’s vacuum pump as an example, Latour shows how this “invention” can be considered as modern and revolutionary only if one starts periodizing—for example, by including certain events on a time line and excluding others (such as magic and religion) that would derail the invention’s teleology.³ Thus does Latour conclude that “time is not a general framework but a provisional result of the connection among entities.”⁴

In effect, Stock and Latour both work to derationalize rationality, thereby opening up possibilities for cultural studies of its technologies and drawing our attention, not to the question of power and rationality, but to the political power of rationality.⁵ How does “rationality” intervene to re-draw, to “re-cognize,” what counts as knowledge? Stock and Latour’s respective work is especially useful for interrogating medieval epistemologies, and has inspired my own interest in the tension between so-called traditional practices of medieval cartography—specifically, mappaemundi, the ubiquitous cartographic representation from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries—and purportedly rational and “modern” Ptolemaic cartographic practices, which became dominant in Western Europe in the fifteenth century and were notable for locating and representing objects in gridded space. The current textbook narrative of medieval cartography typifies this tension. Although such narratives are quite sophisticated and in fact eschew any notion of linear progression in medieval mapping, they nevertheless keep separate medieval mappaemundi from Ptolemaic maps: “whereas the didactic and symbolic mappaemundi served to present the faithful with moralized versions of Christian history from the Creation to the Last Judgment, Claudius Ptolemy’s instructions on how to compile a map of the known world were strictly practical.”⁶ Typically, the literature on medieval maps regards mappaemundi as encyclopedic, “unscientific,” whereas Ptolemaic cartography is considered a first step toward a “modern” practice. Mappaemundi get sorted out as “traditional” and Ptolemaic maps as “rational.” Supersession is at stake here.

This chapter attends to graphic details of these maps to tell a different story. Instead of sorting them out, it superimposes the “messy,” monster-infested, encyclopedic medieval mappaemundi on the gridded Ptolemaic maps. Indeed, as I show, the overlaps and misalignments of these two cartographic practices graph the Christian typological imaginary in ways that need to be better understood in medieval cartography in particular and medieval studies in general.⁷ To explain what is at stake in viewing the relationship between these cartographic practices as I do, I turn briefly to the work of anthropologist Johannes Fabian, who has studied early modern ethnography (a mapping practice in its own right) and its constructions of time and the other. Fabian claims that early modern ethnography came to deny what he calls the “coevalness,” or contemporaneity, of its encounter with the other. According to Fabian, such denial occurs when there is a “persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse.”⁸ In other words, rather than seeing itself as coeval with its referent, or part of the same time, anthropology tended instead to deny this coevalness and imagine itself as part of an allegedly more modern and rational time, and its referent part of a more primitive, irrational time.

Early modern ethnography did not, however, initiate such practices. When early Christians cut off Jews and their Hebrew scriptures from the “now” and placed them in a past superseded by the New Testament, they inaugurated the denial of coevalness. This chapter traces how the Christian typological imaginary extended itself to cartographic practices. Medieval maps helped to fabricate contemporary Jews as the first ethnographic “primitives,” since, as I shall show, medieval mapping practices denied coevalness to Jews, just as social scientists rendered primitive their anthropological “referents.” To rephrase Fabian and draw on the work of Jonathan Boyarin, there is a “persistent and systematic tendency” to place Jews in a time other than the supersessionary present of Christendom.

What follows is an attempt to delineate some of the ways medieval Christians used graphic technologies to inscribe supersession cartographically. Medieval maps became an important graphic surface for the Christian typological imaginary. Cartographic inscription was neither neutral nor insignificant, for, as we shall see, translating Jews from time into space was a way in which medieval Christians could colonize—by imagining that they exercised dominion over supersession.⁹ Although one of the goals of this chapter is to bring the typological imaginary of medieval mapping practices into view, medieval maps cannot be thought about in isolation, since the very notion of a map as an isolated stand-alone object is already an effect of modernist production of cartographic space. Both mappaemundi and Ptolemaic maps need to be studied as links in a chain of translations that graphically dispossessed medieval Jews of coevalness. This chapter, therefore, reads maps within a network of translations in order to discern their interacting imaginaries. The network includes diverse but relevant textual material, such as twelfth-century anti-Jewish polemic, fourteenth-century travel literature, and fifteenth-century Christian-Hebrew studies, as well as the instruments of translation, namely, astrolabes and alphabets.

The “Mother” of the Astrolabe: Dispossessing the Foreskin

I start with the dispossessions that take place in the most widely disseminated of medieval anti-Jewish polemics, Petrus Alfonsi’s Dialogue Against the Jews (1108–1110). In this Dialogue, Petrus Alfonsi, himself a converted Jew, educated in Arabic, learned in biblical Hebrew, an ambassador of Arabic science to France and England, disputes with his former Jewish self, which he enfolds in the persona of his interlocutor called Moses. He wields his Dialogue like a knife to excise this former self.¹⁰ His polemic is distinctive for deploying not only scientific arguments, but also, for the first time in this genre, scientific diagrams. He uses “science” to discredit talmudic knowledge for its irrationality.¹¹ In the Dialogue’s longest scientific excursus, Alfonsi attacks the talmudic exegesis of Nehemiah 9: 6, “the hosts of heaven shall worship thee,” which locates the dwelling of God in the West. Only rabbinical ignorance of the concepts of time and longitude, according to Alfonsi, could allow such error to persist. After unveiling Moses’ ignorance, he then proceeds to teach him an astronomy lesson wherein he asserts the relativity of East and West, of dawn and sunset. Alfonsi’s astronomy lesson teaches the concept of longitude, whereby the contingent position of the observer using an astrolabe to take measurements determines relative timing and spacing. By marking such a difference between talmudic interpretation and the instrumentality of astronomy, Alfonsi implicitly constructs the rational observer as a Christian (male) and excludes Jews from this privileged position, the site of the one who knows. Alfonsi thus uses the “reason” of science in this excursus to deny his coevalness with Moses and to relegate him to a time other than the present of his scientific discourse. Science trumps or supersedes the Talmud.

The astronomy lesson of the Dialogue drew on knowledge of the astrolabe.¹² Astronomy texts and astrolabes dating from the eleventh and twelfth centuries document Jewish and Arabic use of the astrolabe in Andalusian Spain.¹³ Of the six Andalusian astrolabes surviving from the eleventh century, one of the oldest, dated to 1029–30 from its inscription, has scratched on its surface the Hebrew equivalents for certain engraved Arabic star-names (Figure 3a, b). These graffiti attest to the cross-cultural use of this instrument. Scientific texts also indicate active Jewish participation in astronomical and astrological studies at Andalusian courts in the early twelfth century. A Toledan Jew, Abraham ibn Ezra, wrote eight noted treatises in astrology, among which is his treatise on the astrolabe (1146–48). The earliest set of astronomical tables in Hebrew, drawn up by Abraham Bar Hiyya in 1104, just predates the conversion of Petrus Alfonsi. The Dialogue thus misrepresents the actual technological expertise of contemporary Jews and in so doing dispossesses them of their own astrolabes as well as their scientific texts.¹⁴

Figure 3a. Andalusian astrolabe by Mohammed ben Al-Saal, 1029. As reproduced in Robert T. Gunther, The Eastern Astrolabes, vol. 1 of Astrolabes of the World, 3rd ed. (London: William Holland Press, 1972), no. 116.

This historical evidence for such close intertwining of Arabic and Jewish astronomical studies and instruments makes Alfonsi’s dispossession of Jews from astronomical discourse all the more stunning. Alfonsi stripped Jews of their coeval contribution to Andalusian astronomy and then infantilized and feminized their talmudic learning as the “verba jocantium in scholis puerorum, vel nentium in plateis mulierum” (“joking words of schoolboys and gossip of women in the streets”).¹⁵ Alfonsi could imagine the “universal” rational principles of the astrolabe as a means to purify him of his “pre-conversion”self, of the talmudic Jew, whom he abjects in the Dialogue. Since the astrolabe relativizes time by linking it to the circuits of the sun and stars, Petrus Alfonsi, with astrolabe in hand, need no longer remain incarnated temporally, ontologically, in that abject place from which Moses is said to come in the Dialogue. Alfonsi literally diagrams for himself a new place in the sun. The astrolabe thus becomes the instrumental means by which Alfonsi can both dispossess himself of his former Jewish self and through its possession ward off the shattering aspects of the dispossession he effects; in a word, the astrolabe is, for Alfonsi, a fetish.¹⁶

Figure 3b. Detail of the Hebrew equivalent of the engraved Arabic star names on Mohammed ben Al-Saal’s 1029 astrolabe.

Theological Telephones

At the very time Alfonsi was writing his anti-Jewish polemic, Christian biblical scholars of the Victorine school in Paris engaged local Jewish intellectuals in ways that Beryl Smalley and her students have thought of as cooperative, respectful, curious. Could it be that the Victorine interaction with local Jewish intellectuals fostered a sense of coevalness that might counteract Alfonsi’s denial to his Jewish interlocutor? These same Victorines knew Alfonsi’s Dialogue. In eight instances of the sixty-eight manuscripts in which the Dialogue was bound together with other texts, it traveled with Victorine texts. Two volumes of the Alfonsi text were also to be found in their Paris library. Thus the Victorines could consult local rabbis and read anti-Jewish polemic at the same time. To explore this paradox, I investigated the dissemination of cartographic interests among the Victorines. The early twelfth century marks a turning point for the production of mappaemundi. An important text, Imago mundi, written in 1110 by Honorius Augustodunensis, precipitated renewed interest in maps. His cosmography treated celestial and terrestrial geography, the measurement of time, and the six ages of universal history.¹⁷ Largely conservative and deeply derivative, its simplicity and clarity nevertheless guaranteed its wide circulation and broad influence. During the twelfth century Honorius’s text can be found traveling bound with Hugh of St. Victor’s De Arca Noe (1128–29) as well as with Petrus Alfonsi’s Dialogue Against the Jews. The library of St. Victor possessed two copies of this Imago mundi, and, when Hugh of St. Victor wrote his Descriptio mappe mundi in 1128 or 1129, he drew on Honorius’s treatise.

Victorines promoted the fabrication and study of maps. Knowledge of place-names and locations was crucial to Victorine innovations in biblical exegesis. The cartographic texts and maps they introduced into their schoolrooms also inspired their meditations on temporality and history. Hugh of St. Victor viewed history as a narrative sequence, a series narrationis: “if we investigate things carefully according to the sequence of time, the succession of generations and the arrangement of truths taught, we can claim confidently to have reached all leaves of divine scripture.”¹⁸ He desired that this temporal “sorting out” be drawn graphically (depingere), because things cannot show themselves without such aids (“res ipsas non possunt presentare”).¹⁹ His insistence on representing the “visibility” of series narrationis through graphic media thus marks a fresh direction in the mappaemundi tradition. What once functioned pedagogically came to be joined among the Victorines to emerging theological notions of the visible and sacramental—that is, mappaemundi could now be deployed as a graphic technology of the visible, not unlike the sacraments themselves, especially the Eucharist.²⁰

To refine their literal studies of the Bible, Hugh of St. Victor and his students consulted with Jewish rabbis about Hebrew philology and interpretation. In effect they approached local rabbis as intimate artifacts of the Old Testament. The question of their coevalness was a vexed one—in Beryl Smalley’s compelling words: “the Jew appealed to him [the student of the Bible] as a kind of telephone to the Old Testament.”²¹ Like the astrolabe, the theological telephone, another technological device, paradoxically interrupted coevalness between Christian and Jewish scholars in the early twelfth century. A consideration of Victorine mapping of Jews in their apocalyptic thought can help us understand the fantasy of supersession that is intrinsic to such intellectual exchanges, in which contemporary Jews were called upon to perform as relics.

Literal readings of the Bible among Victorines not only inspired their interest in history, geography, and maps but also prompted apocalyptic speculations. The apocalyptic mapping of the enclosed peoples of Gog and Magog onto mappaemundi can help to track ways in which such maps troubled the coevalness of Jews. Pedagogical texts such as Hugh’s Descriptio are a case in point.²² Early patristic, rabbinical, and Qur’anic scholars speculated on the identity of Gog and Magog. To this commentary attached different versions of the enclosure of peoples and their eruption as a sign of the Last Days. Not mapped as a locus on late Roman maps from which prototypes of the mappaemundi borrowed, nor for that matter depicted on the early mappaemundi of the Beatus Apocalypse group, Gog and Magog begin to appear as entries on twelfth-century maps drawn under the influence of Victorine biblical studies.²³ Increasingly over the twelfth-century, texts and maps link the Jews with stories of the enclosed peoples of Gog and Magog. As early as Orosius in the fifth century, links in this chain of associations of Gog and Magog with the Jews begin to be forged. He attached to the story of the birth of Alexander the Great, builder of Alexander’s Gate to enclose Gog and Magog, a tale of the deportation of Jews to the area of the Gate from which they will eventually erupt in the last days.²⁴ Importantly, in his Descriptio, Hugh of St. Victor textually maps Gog and Magog with the apocalyptic tradition: “contra has regiones, in oceano septrionali, sunt insule in quibus habitant gentes ille Gog Magog, de quibus in Apocalypsi legitur” (“abutting this region, in the western ocean are islands in which live that people, Gog Magog, about which it is written in the Apocalypse”).²⁵ In his widely disseminated canonical encyclopedia of biblical history, Historia scholastica, Peter Comestor (d. 1179), a member of the Victorine circle who retired to St. Victor in his last years, further forged the links in the chain between apocalypse, Gog and Magog, and Jews by specifically identifying the ten lost tribes of Israel as the peoples enclosed behind Alexander’s Gate.²⁶ Victorines thus inscribed Jews on mappaemundi when they marked the site of Gog and Magog.

Herein lies the paradox of Victorines consulting with local Jews at the same time that they graphed Jews into the insurrections of the Last Days. The apocalyptic telos of the Victorines envisioned the apocalypse as a radical space stripped of earthly time. The combination of long distance telephone calls to the Old Testament made by Victorines via Parisian Jews, in tandem with their locating Jews as the enclosed peoples of the apocalyptic Gog and Magog, thus had the effect of a double detemporalization. It robbed these Jews of a past in the present by dispossessing them of their coeval engagement with science and hermeneutics in the medieval world. Moreover this apocalyptic scripting deprived them of a future in the present, that is, an open-ended, contingent, “history that will be.”²⁷ To understand the deepening process of dispossession, I now turn to the problem of graphic inscription itself.

Graphic Dispossession: “For I had lettres”

The astrolabe, depictions of Gog and Magog, and attitudes toward contemporary medieval Jews converge in the Travels of Mandeville, a popular travel book of the later fourteenth century.²⁸ The Travels further overlays such convergence with maps of different alphabets that punctuate the text. The Hebrew alphabet comes to be marked as a tool of threat and conspiracy against Christians.²⁹ The Travels, like the work of the Victorine school, has, nevertheless, been praised by scholars such as Mary Campbell and Stephen Greenblatt for its tolerance. Yet the Jews, Greenblatt notes, were the “most significant exception to tolerance.”³⁰ The force of their exclusion strikes even more when the model of human diversity in the Travels is taken into account. Drawing on prevalent astrological notions regarding the influence of the movement of the stars and planets on human nature, the Travels argues that it is not “who” you were (identity), but “where” you were (geography) that accounted for human diversity. The reliance on contingency of place instead of some fixed notion of human essence did foster tolerance, until this astrological model of human diversity intersected with an apocalyptic tradition of “astrological” theology. It is to that tradition that I now turn briefly, since an understanding of its influence on the narrator of the Travels can help to delineate how a profound dispossession of Jews rests at the heart of this so-called tolerant astrological model of human diversity.

Throughout the fourteenth century, medieval scholars increasingly sought to calibrate the “time line” of universal history with calculations from astronomy and astrology in order to refine predictions for the onset of the Last Days.³¹ Valerie Flint has observed that early in the Imago mundi Honorius consistently interpolated information on astrology and magic into his revisions of his world history. Pierre d’Ailly (1350–1420), whose 1410 Imago mundi Christopher Columbus read and annotated, attempted to align the relative chronologies found in world histories (drawn from such diverse sources as biblical history, Greek and Roman history, papal lists, and the events of contemporary history) onto an “independent” time line dated by astrological conjunctions. Students of conjunctions had studied, in particular, the “historical” paths of Saturn and Jupiter through the zodiac and observed their relations to each other. Using their conjunctions as chronological points, d’Ailly then constructed his astrological time line which provided for a serial transition from past to future, from history to prophecy. In order to authorize this “scientific” approach to theological temporality, scholars needed to prognosticate successfully. The ensuing pressure to predict events contributed to an overdetermining concern with timing of the advent of Antichrist: “l’astrologie devient une herméneutique de l’apocalypse chrétienne.”³² Calculation of that advent entangled astrological theology with popular conflations of medieval Jews with Gog and Magog, whose eruption would be the sign of his coming.³³ Thus scholarly models of “human diversity” paradoxically resonated with popular notions that denied Jewish neighbors their coevalness.

The exclusion of Jews from this tolerant astrological model of human diversity can be traced in the Travels through the medium of the alphabet. What astrology liberally relativized in the Travels, its alphabet-lore reinstalled as a hard line between West and East. The Travels uses a geography of the alphabet as one of its chief ploys to exclude Jews.³⁴ Alphabets appear in the text when the narrator arrives at the border of a region. At that point he traces out the forms and names of the letters of its alphabet. Such topographical edges and their respective alphabets occur along Mandeville’s route in the following order: Greek, Egyptian, Hebrew, Saracen, Persian, and Chaldean. This alphabetical mapping exercise ends as the traveler comes to the islands of India. At the juncture the narrative turns from a traceable land route to a watery voyage marked by the interruptions of the many islands of an archipelago.

As the Travels encounters Indians it waxes “rational,” just as Alfonsi did in his Dialogue when he countered Moses and his talmudic interpretation with scientific discussion of the contingency of longitude. The traveler leaves alphabets behind on the Indian archipelago and enters a world governed by stars.³⁵ The longest commentary on the astral geography of the archipelago occurs on the Indian isle of Lamary where, the author informs his reader, the Lamarians live in a state of nature. They go naked and hold sexual partners and property in common. Lamarians observe no rule of descent and parcel out their offspring to sexual partners without distinctions. Since they recognize no rules of kinship and therefore have no incest taboo, it is not surprising to learn that the Larmarians are the first cannibals to be encountered in the Travels. They literally perform the undoing of kinship by eating their children. Christian readers, who were familiar with exempla and also ritual murder stories that portrayed Jews as the local cannibals of Christendom, certainly might think of Jews when they read about Lamarians.³⁶ It is precisely at this overdetermined juncture that the narrator begins his discourse on the astrolabe. He argues for the roundness of the earth and its circumnavigability by means of a lecture on longitude:³⁷

The whiche thing I prove thus, after that i have seyn. For I have ben toward the partes of Braban and beholden in the Astrolabre that the steere that is clept the transmontayne is liiii. degrees high, And more forthere in Almayne and Bewme it hath lviii. degrees, and more forth toward the parties Septemtrioneles it is lxii. degrees of heghte and certeyn mynutes, for I self have mesured it be the Astrolabe.³⁸

After this technological interlude, the Travels then leaves behind the cannibalistic Lamarians in order to pass on to the lands of Prester John. The site of Gog and Magog, however, stands directly in the way. Once again Jews interrupt the itinerary, this time not evocatively, as in the case of the Lamarians, but overtly, as the Travels describes the ten lost tribes enclosed in Gog and Magog.³⁹ According to the Travels Jews cannot escape their enclosure because the only language they know is Hebrew, a language unknown to neighboring communities:

and also thei conen no langage but only hire owne that noman knoweth but thei, and therfore mowe thei not gon out. And also thee schull understonde that the Iewes han no propre lond of hire owne for to dwellen inne in all the world, but only that lond betwene the mountaynes.⁴⁰

The Travels also insists here that the Jews have persisted in this seemingly counterproductive monolingualism in order to be able to recognize each other as fellow conspirators in the last days:

And thit natheless men seyn thei schull gon out in the tyme of Antecrist and that thei schull maken gret slaughter of cristene men, and therfore all the Iewes that dwellen in all londes lernen all weys to speken Ebrew, in hope that whan the other Iewes schull gone out, that thei may understonden hire speche and to leden hem in to cristendom for to destroye the cristene peple. For the Iewes seyn that thei knowen wel be hire prophecyes that thei of Caspye schull gon out and spreden throgh out all the world. And that the cristene men schull ben under hire subieccioun als longe as thei han ben in subieccioun of hem.⁴¹

The spoken Hebrew (could the narrator of the Travels be recognizing emergent Yiddish?) in the “East” of the Travels thus begins to collide with the Hebrew alphabet located by the narrator in the “West.” One suspects that the author saw a gap between “classical” or scriptural languages and the spoken language of medieval Jews in northern Europe. Whereas the Travels uses alphabets to guarantee “Western” civilization and the stars to explain “natural” (Eastern) diversity, this division of labor in the text breaks down with spoken Hebrew, which the narrator maps in the space of the apocalypse (Gog and Magog) and casts as a language of conspiracy, a technology of Antichrist. Hebrew is thus modelled as a language of a people doomed to be a “who you are,” a people excluded from the Travels tolerant diversity of “where you are.” Jews interrupt the so-called “rational” tolerance of the text. If, according to Greenblatt, the narrator “takes possession of nothing,”⁴² it does not mean that he refrains from dispossession. Secure in his rationalism, in the “lettres”⁴³ that guarantee him access to forbidden places, the narrator of the Travels can continue the medieval Christian rational project of dispossessing the Jews, this time layering the astrolabe with spoken Hebrew.

The Travels is certainly not the first medieval text to play with alphabets; significantly for my argument, however, it produces its practices of inclusion and exclusion through their staging. It uncouples the alphabet from its acoustical/graphic modalities in order to map letters as territory itself. The letters thus become cartographic codes.⁴⁴ The Travels uses the alphabet to represent the space of territory, not the time of reading and writing. Such cartographic use of alphabets actually comes from the astrolabe, which serves as the model for such coding.

Let me pause here to show how the alphabet becomes part of an astronomical machine. At the time of composing the Travels astrolabes were commonly used to tell time as Figure 4, a reproduction of a diagram from Geoffrey Chaucer’s essay on the astrolabe, illustrates. Readers of the Travels who wished to tell time with the astrolabe would find themselves using the alphabet as a code. Telling time with this instrument involved the cross-correlation of the altitude of the sun read from the rule on the backside of the astrolabe with the positioning of the rete to correspond to the date of the reading on its frontside. The pointer on the label would then fall on one of 23 capital letters of the alphabet, or a cross, which marked 15-degree increments of the 24-hour day on the outer border of the astrolabe. The user would then count off the positions of the letters to arrive at the hour of the day.⁴⁵ The alphabet thus came to share in the mechanicity of the astrolabe. It was inscribed as a code on a portable object with moveable parts. The reading of the code is a repeatable procedure; and the alphabet encodes time as spatial demarcation. The Travels mobilizes the alphabet code of the astrolabe to mechanize human diversity.

So far I have suggested that the strategic invocation of scientific rationalism in the form of astronomical discourse on longitude and latitude, grounded in the use of the astrolabe, emerges at critical moments of encounter with Jews in the work of Petrus Alfonsi and Mandeville’s Travels. The Travels not only uses that strand of rationalism but also incorporates the apocalyptic cartography of the Victorines, who in spite of their purported tolerance linked Jews with the peoples of Gog and Magog and the fantasized annihilation of Christians at the hands of the Jews in the last days. The Travels goes even further. Not only does the narrator of Mandeville measure with the astrolabe, he also transfers its alphabetical code as he textualizes territory. Like the alphabetical code on the astrolabe, alphabets in the Travels are cartographical codes that excise the alphabet from the particular temporalities of reading words. Human diversity in the Travels thus becomes a kind of mechanized universalism. Only a secret, spoken language, Hebrew, escapes this coding at the cost of intolerance.⁴⁶

These different “rational” moments attest to the violence that can lurk in between time and space in medieval mapping practices. I now wish to consider, at last, the printed editions of Ptolemy’s Geography, along with Christian-Hebrew studies that developed just as the Geography came to press. What might seem separate endeavors, cartography and humanist philology, I argue are intimately intertwined in intensifying detemporalization of contemporary Jews. Put another way, it is not surprising to see Christian intellectuals, such as Pico della Mirandola, deeply involved in Jewish Kabbala and Ptolemaic geography. What Michael Taussig has described for a New World colonial context as the “search for the White Indian,” I appropriate here as the “search for the classic Jew” or the “Jew of Hebrew Scripture” (that is, the pre-crucifixion Jew, not the Talmud Jew of medieval Northern Europe). By the latter part of the fifteenth century the Christian typological imaginary repetitiously incarnated the “Talmud Jew” (whom they had so radically detemporalized) into mechanical reproduction, that is, into printing itself.⁴⁷

Figure 4. Illustration from Chaucer’s lesson on telling time with the astrolabe. MS Cambridge Dd.3.53. By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

The ABC of Ptolemy: The Alphabet as Territory

Changes in script and the reception of the Geography in the fifteenth century are closely bound. Humanists gridded the letters of the alphabet just as they gridded cartographic space. The difference a grid makes can be exemplified by comparing two alphabets, one dating from 1460, the alphabet of Marie de Bourgogne, and the other from 1480, known as the alphabet of Damianus Moyllus.⁴⁸ This alphabet is the first printed version of an alphabet in Roman font. A manuscript treatise on the design of the Roman alphabet, written by Felice Feliciano (1460–63) at the same time as the execution of the Gothic alphabet of Marie de Bourgogne, did not make its way into print. The differences between the Gothic and Roman alphabets are starkly drawn. Compare the letter “M” of the de Bourgogne alphabet (Figure 5) with the letter “A” of the Moyllus alphabet (Figure 6). The “M” seems to pun acoustically on “M” for “mâchoire” or jaw. The jaw is drawn in the resemblance of the clitoris, the orifices burst out of the elaborated, fragmented frame of the gothic letter, as if genitals gird the dissolving ductus of this letter. The Roman letters of the Moyllus alphabet, in contrast, are “constructed” from the principles of geometry. The letter “A” features none of the acoustical punning or anthropomorphizing typical of the de Bourgogne letters. The letters of the Roman alphabet materialize within their own self-sufficient geometric grid. So constructed, Roman type effaced its own historicity to produce a timeless, monumental space, cleansed of the corporeal excess of the de Bourgogne letter.

Historians of the Roman font trace the design to the courts of the Este in Ferrara and the Gonzaga in Mantua. It is also at the Este court where astrologers approved Nicolaus Germanus’s manuscript edition of Ptolemy, which served as the exemplar for the printed Ulm editions of 1482 and 1486. Printers of an incunabular Geography consistently set the text in the Roman alphabet. Their choice of typeface, I want to argue, is more than just a “style.” Rather, the choice to print with Roman typeface complemented the refiguring of temporality encoded in the gridded cartographic space of the maps that travelled with the Geography. Let me turn to a detailed discussion of a printed edition of the Geography to expand on this claim.

Figure 5. Letter M from Marie de Bourgogne’s alphabet. As reproduced in Pierre Dumon, L’Alphabet gothique dit de Marie de Bourgogne: Reproduction du codex Bruxellensis II 845 (Antwerp: De Nederlandsche Boekhandel, 1973).

“Rediscovered” in its translation from Greek into Latin in 1405–1409, Ptolemy’s Geography presented its students with a practical guide to constructing maps on a grid of longitude and latitude and offered a list of these coordinates for over 8,000 place-names, grouped by the imperial regions current in the late antique world.⁴⁹ A work much published by Italian and German printers, an edition of a Geography staked a cultural claim for the publisher’s city in trans-European print culture. Each edition of the Geography became what Lisa Jardine has termed “the basis for further collaborative attention, repersonalising and revivifying the ‘dead letter’ of the printed page.”⁵⁰ The front and back matter, especially indices, began to accrete around these different printed iterations of the Geography. Such editorial elaborations changed the ways readers might read the text. Francesco Berlinghieri’s vernacular verse adaptation of Ptolemy, for example, was the first edition (Florence 1482) to include tabulae novellae, or updated maps, in this instance for Spain, France, Italy, and the Holy Land. Berlinghieri’s edition also included new front matter that aided the reader’s navigation through the Ptolemaic treatise. On folio 2r of this edition the Ptolemaic regions were alphabetized (from Achaia to Vindelicia), after which the relevant book, chapter, and map number were listed for each regional name. This edition also alphabetized the place-names of each region at the end of each book and then listed the respective longitude and latitude. The maps for each region were placed after each book. This editorial apparatus thus used the different chapter or “book” divisions as its basic organizational unit and alphabetized information with reference to each of its books.⁵¹

Figure 6. Letter A from the Damianus Moyllus alphabet, Parma. As reproduced in Stanley Morison, ed., The Moyllus Alphabet: A Newly Discovered Treatise on Classic Letter Design Printed at Parma c. 1480 (New York: Pegasus, 1927).

The 1486 edition of the Geography printed at Ulm (the second edition to be printed north of the Alps) shows the treatise on the way to becoming an atlas, a cartographic genre that would achieve its full commercial success in the sixteenth century. This edition is notable for several reasons. First, like all previous editions including its prototype, the 1482 Ulm edition, it is printed in Roman type, the typeface of choice for “scientific” texts.⁵² (The mathematician Regiomontanus and Hermann Schedel of Nuremberg had just introduced the typeface to German presses north of the Alps.⁵³) The printer of the 1486 Ptolemy recycled the woodcut maps of the 1482 edition, but made significant additions to the front and back matter of the volume. Most importantly, elaborating on and significantly rearranging the editorial aids of Berlinghieri, the 1486 Ulm Ptolemy included an alphabetized register of places, Registrum alphabeticum super octo libros Ptolomaei as prefatory material to the Geography. This Registrum was compiled from each of the indices of the regional books (Books 2–7) and was accompanied by cross-listings of the number of the map on which the place could be located. A brief descriptive annotation accompanied many of the alphabetized places.⁵⁴ Thenceforth, editions of the Geography would travel with front and back matter.⁵⁵ This seemingly mundane Registrum alphabeticum had powerful, if unintended, effects as an editorial apparatus. By alphabetizing all places without regard to the book-by-book regional divisions, this edition stripped the Geography of time, the timing of reading and browsing through the treatise. It superimposed instead an alphabetical list, or grid, onto a cartographic grid of longitude and latitude.⁵⁶ Readers could locate the name of a place in the alphabetic list at the front of the volume and then could simply turn to the relevant map at the back of the volume to verify its cartographic location. The alphabetical list of places and map references meant that it was no longer necessary, as it had been prior to their introduction, to peruse the chapters of the Geography in order to link a place with a map. By the time of publication of the Strassburg edition of 1513, this editorial tool had reached its empirical minimalism in the form of a long list of alphabetized places (culled from the Ptolemaic maps) and cross-listed with their longitude and latitude (Figure 7). The effect of this apparatus was to make the Geography work like an atlas before the production of atlases (a phenomenon of the mid-sixteenth century).

In addition, the 1486 Ptolemy is also the first edition to append a short treatise after the maps entitled “on three parts of the world and the various men, portents and transformations with rivers, islands and mountains.” Using excerpts from the work of Isidore and Vincent of Beauvais, it offered readers familiar encyclopedic fare typically associated with mappaemundi.⁵⁷ In sum, the 1486 Ptolemy layers a range of complex material: Roman typeface as signifier of the “scientific” content of the Geography, an alphabetized register of places cross-referenced to their respective maps (a tool that enables the book to work more like an atlas), and finally, a seemingly atavistic encyclopedic tract on the wonders of the world.

The Registrum, so conceived, marked the use of alphabetization as an increasingly effective indexing tool for cartography. The alphabet grid indexed to longitude and latitude produced a matrix with ramifications for processes of detemporalization under discussion in this essay.⁵⁸ It might be argued that since Ptolemaic maps did not grid apocalyptic space, that they would seem to arrest processes of detemporalization. Indeed, by “cleansing” cartographical space of the apocalypse and by cleansing the alphabet of the overdetermined territorial coding noted in the Travels, Ptolemaic maps might be understood as agents of amnesia that erased evidence of a troubling history of detemporalizing Jews—the entangled layers so far discussed of Gog and Magog, the Hebrew alphabet, and the Hebrew language. In pondering this, it is important to remember that Ptolemaic maps did not circulate in isolation from other humanist projects. These maps need to be considered in terms of new arguments about philology made in Christian-Hebrew studies.

Figure 7. First page of alphabetical register of places and coordinates from Ptolemy, Geographie opus nouissima traductione (Argentina). Courtesy of the Rare Books Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lennox, and Tilden Foundations.

Classical Christianity and the “Classic” Jew