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“Where do you find paradise on a map? . . . As Alessandro Scafi shows in his erudite history of the Christian effort to map paradise, pre-modern mapmakers focused on spiritual navigation, not the secular kind. They tried to portray time and space in a way that is still beautiful, but can seem baffling. Their maps showed God, history, and human woes and joys, often biblical ones. The Garden of Eden was a real place, just as Adam was a real man. . . . Mr Scafi tells this story well from the sublime start to the ridiculous end, with spectacular flourishes of art history and confident quotes from Latin, Greek and Hebrew.”
The Economist

MAPPING PARADISE

A History of Heaven on Earth

Alessandro Scafi

The book of Genesis offers few details on the location of the Garden of Eden, but that hasn't stopped people from trying to find it. While many paradise seekers believe Eden can be found in the Middle East, others have placed it in Ethopia, Sri Lanka, and even Missouri. Some say the Garden was wiped out in the Great Flood, while others contest it never had a terrestrial existence. It's a question that has plagued believers since the beginning of Christianity and, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there is still no end to the stream of theories on the location of the former Garden of Eden.

The first book to show how paradise has been expressed in cartographic form throughout two millennia, Mapping Paradise explores the intellectual conditions that made the medieval mapping of paradise possible and the challenge for mapmakers to make visible a place that was geographically inaccessible and yet real, remote in time and yet still the scene of an essential episode of the history of salvation. A history of the cartography of paradise that journeys from the beginning of Christianity to the present day, Mapping Paradise reveals how the most deeply reflective thoughts about the ultimate destiny of all human life have been molded—and remolded—generation by generation.

Alessandro Scafi is a lecturer at the University of Bologna, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Warburg Institute, University of London.

 

Alessandro Scafi is available for interviews. For more information please contact Stephanie Hlywak
at (773) 702-0376
sxh@press.uchicago.edu