The Sovereign Map

Theoretical Approaches in Cartography throughout History

Edited by Edward H. Dahl
Translated by Tom Conley

Cloth $65.00 ISBN: 9780226389530 Published September 2006

A novel work in the history of cartography, The Sovereign Map argues that maps are as much about thinking as seeing, as much about the art of persuasion as the science of geography. As a classicist, Christian Jacob brings a fresh eye to his subject—which includes maps from Greek Antiquity to the twentieth century—and provides a theoretical approach to investigating the power of maps to inform, persuade, and inspire the imagination.

Beginning with a historical overview of maps and their creation—from those traced in the dirt by primitive hands to the monumental Dutch atlases and ornate maps on Italian palace walls—Jacob goes on to consider the visual components of cartography: the decorative periphery, geometric grid, topographical lines, dots, details of iconographic figures, and many other aspects. Considering text on maps—titles, toponyms, legends, and keys—Jacob proposes that writing can both clarify and interfere with a map's visual presentation. Finally Jacob examines the role of the viewer in decoding a map's meaning and the role of society in defining the power of maps as authoritative depictions of space.

Innovative in its philosophical motivation and its interdisciplinary approach to looking at and writing about maps, The Sovereign Map is eagerly awaited by scholars from many different fields.

Review Quotes
Contents

“This translation of Christian Jacob’s L’Empire des Cartes makes a seminal work on the nature, function, and reception of the map through time, built on the foundations laid by Brian Harley and other Anglo-American scholars, available to an English-speaking audience. A challenging work, The Sovereign Map explodes cozy, traditional assumptions about the nature and role of maps. Jacob discusses the essential physical nature and psychological role of map-like objects and analyses all of the elements of the map in its myriad forms, including structure, design, decoration, accompanying texts, toponymy, title, intended use, and the mechanisms through which it is perceived and received by the user. In the process he establishes the relevance of the study of the map and its history to serious scholars in all fields of the humanities and the social sciences.”—Peter Barber, Head of Map Collections at the British Library

"A work of surpassing historical scholarship, brilliantly organized, and executed with all the skills of a great narrative artist, Jacob’s epochal achievement not only charts the sovereign and ubiquitous reach of maps: it supplies the wise ways of reading between the signs, so that we might bend back the bars of latitude and longitude, escape the prison house of our imperial projections, and begin to write the earth less schematically, more inclusively”—Paul Carter, University of Melbourne

“Christian Jacob’s simple question—What is a map?—opens for the reader a profound and complex but also compelling meditation on cartography as a means of recording, creating, and communicating spatial knowledge in images and words. Much more than a history of cartography, Jacob’s L’empire des cartes profoundly influenced recent thinking and writing about maps and mapping. Now carefully translated into English, The Sovereign Map and its philosophical and cultural insights will reach a wider readership at a time when interest in the matter and meaning of maps has never been more intense or more necessary.”—Denis Cosgrove, University of California, Los Angeles

“The Sovereign Map is a compelling, often poetic, and always thought-provoking reconsideration of the nature of maps and their history. Jacob takes nothing for granted, not even the practices of map folding, in order to apply a truly fresh eye to these otherwise familiar and mundane images. In the process, he covers extensive intellectual ground, from Aristophanes to Jules Verne, from the Museum at Alexandria to modern national mapping agencies. The result is a multilayered vision of the architecture, rhetoric, materiality, and plasticity of maps and of the rhythms and discontinuities of their history. The scholarly breadth, rigor, and humor of Jacob’s discussion lead us to a new appreciation of maps as deeply human texts and of the very nature of knowledge and representation.”— Matthew H. Edney, director of the History of Cartography Project, University of Wisconsin

“Jacob’s genealogy of maps is a tour de force combining literary and visual analyses, history of science, science studies, and cartographic theory to produce a gripping account of how maps work to seduce us, persuade us, and shape us. The Sovereign Map interrogates the grammars, visual forms, and material media used to produce specific maps, narrating the ways in which ‘the rhythms of cartographic production’ shape the histories of collective imagination. Importantly, Jacob shows how specific technologies and practices of map-making and use (such as print culture) frame and order our understanding of the world by naming, classifying, coding, and organizing the elements on the map. The Sovereign Map is both an exciting history of map-making and a history and sociology of the making of geographical knowledge.”—John Pickles, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

"An encyclopedic book of striking erudition un which virtually every visible element in the nature and composition of maps is put under the microscope of [Jacob's] informed intellect."—George Falconer, Geomatica

"This is a very heavy and phiosophical work, but one of the most important to be published recently dealing with maps."—J. B. Post, Portolan

"A significant book that is likely . . . to have a major impact within the scholarly worlds it has both studied and extended."

“Important in that it contributes to a literature weak in theoretical analysis of early maps.”—Choice

"An important addition to the literature and one that will certainly shape Anglophone scholarship on the history of cartography."—Susan Schulten, Isis

"Cartography plays a central role in knowledge integration in the twenty-first century, and this book provides a valuable historical building block for research on this important topic. . . . The Sovereign Map remains one of the most important contributions to an understanding of maps and mapping in recent years and should be required reading for all cartographers."

"The author and his translators have considerably expanded our ability to discuss what maps do and how they change."

"This is a wonderful book. I think it shows through a careful historical reading how cartography has not been a mad project to achieve the unachievable; rather it has always been both the product and the driver of the thinking in particular places and times where each map was made."

"This is a profound and important book. . . . In no way should it be seen as a history of cartography; it is rather a prolonged reflection on the philosophy of the map, how it is viewed by creator and user, how it achieves its purposes, how it communicates at every level of meaning, deliberately or unconsciously, how it displays or hides the various messages that it conveys."

"The range of this volume remains extraordinary. . . . This gives Jacob an extraordinarily generous space for exploration. The result is a remarkable piece of scholarship."

"It would be a great shame if this book were read only by cartographers. . . . The Sovereign Map is essentially a book about the construction of knowledge, the uses of power, and the geography of representations. As such it deserves a wide audience. . . . A book that is likely to be [a] significant point of reference and inspiration."

Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface to the English Language Edition
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Between the Lines of the Map

1. What is a Map?

2. Graphics, Geometry, & Figuration

3. Maps & Writing

4. The Cartographic Image

Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index

For more information, or to order this book, please visit http://www.press.uchicago.edu

Classical Studies

Geography: Cartography | Cultural and Historical Geography

History: General History

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