The Awakening by Charles Freeman

The Awakening by Charles Freeman

Author:Charles Freeman [Freeman, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Head of Zeus


This world map, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, by Abraham Ortelius (1570) is considered one of the most beautiful of the late sixteenth century. While there are inaccuracies in the depictions of the Americas, the coastlines of both east and west have been explored.

Abraham Ortelius’s map of the Americas, from Theatrum Orbis Terrarum; Marzolino / Shutterstock

Before his death in 1594, Mercator produced two more sets of maps. In one (1578) he ignored all the inaccuracies and misconceptions of Ptolemy’s Geographike and reproduced them as the master had decreed. By now this was little more than a tribute to a genius whose achievement had been surpassed. While Ptolemy had believed in an Earth-centred universe, his Almagest was also being made redundant by Copernicus’s theory that the sun was the centre of the solar system. Just before he died, Mercator produced a very accurate series of maps which ignored his projection of 1569. When they were published in 1595, they were the first compilation of maps to bear the title ‘atlas’ on their front page. Mercator’s coinage honoured the mythological Atlas, the Titan who supported the heavens and, according to one version of Greek myth, was king of Mauretania and the first astronomer.

Mercator’s achievements were only part of an outpouring of collections of knowledge that appeared during the sixteenth century. In 1544 Sebastian Münster, a professor of Hebrew at the university of Heidelberg, produced his Cosmographia, a vast encyclopaedia of the known world. An extended edition appeared in 1550. Besides its maps, it contained 1,200 pages, including 1,000 woodblock images, of historical events and individuals, flora and fauna, peoples and city plans. It was written in German rather than Latin and so found a literate audience from the start. By 1628 thirty-five editions had been printed, including translations into English, Czech, French and Italian.

Thus did the European discovery of the New World play a major part in the reawakening of the western mind. Adam Smith, the apostle of free trade, writing in 1776, was in no doubt about this: ‘The discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind.’ And, he added, ‘the full extent of their consequences [is] still unseen’.16

The ‘discoveries’ of the age of exploration provide an excellent example of how ancient knowledge invigorated both intellectual inquiry and more practical avenues of investigation, but was rapidly surpassed as more ‘scientific’ ways of approaching the natural world became established. As the explorer of far northern America, Jacques Cartier, put it in 1545: ‘The simple sailors of today have learned the opposite of the opinion of the philosophers by true experience.’17 Cartier’s words seem to capture a triumph of empirical evidence over ancient theory, marking a key moment in the history of science. But at the same time as the voyages of da Gama, Magellan and Cabot were extending human knowledge of the world’s far-flung oceans and continents, other, similarly curious



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