Content area
Full Text
Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth. By Alessandro Scafi. (London:The British library; Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2006. Pp. 398. $55.00. ISBN 978-0-226-73559-7.)
Why were medieval maps so inaccurate and fanciful, even on well-traveled routes where sailors, traders, or pilgrims knew better? Perhaps early world maps are accurate and insightful descriptions of something, but of what?
This is the questionAlessandro Scafi so engagingly addresses in his erudite, thorough, and beautiful volume, specifically addressing the place of the Garden of Eden, the biblical paradise, on mappae mundi. More than a thousand of these maps survive and their descendants in the modern era are legion. His answer: these mappae mundi are conceptual representations, neither serving the same purpose as today's maps nor ever envisioned so. Their evolution depicts the theological centrality and rational evolution of the concept of perfected Paradise, the beginning and end of time, and man's journey through this cosmography.
Scafi begins with the two interpretations of Eden in early Christian theology: the allegorical and the literal. In the Platonic view of Eden set out by the Judeo-Hellenic philosopher Philo, the garden was the rational human soul, its trees representing virtues and wisdom. The four rivers of Eden represented Prudence, Courage, Self-Mastery, and Justice. Adam was the divine archetype, and...