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In the Book of Nut, the terms qbḥw and qbḥw nṯrw appear to designate a portion of the outermost fringes of the cosmos, to the north/north-west, where an opening of the Duat was located. This paper aims to explore the characterisation of that region, a topographical and cosmographical entity lying on the verge of this world and the next, by comparing the finds from the Book of Nut with the evidence from a Late period “map of cosmos”, on which a similar enigmatic label appears. This will provide a chance to reassess the characterisation of the cosmic boundaries of the world at the threshold of the Duat and the various regenerative scenarios conveyed by later cosmographic texts and representations.

This article interprets a recently recovered manuscript, Tratado de astronomia y la reformacion del tiempo, composed by Antonio Sanchez in New Granada c.1696, in the context of the Spanish and Rena...

This article examines codicological evidence for the presence of an illustrated Persian cosmography (‘ajā’ib al-makhlūqāt) (British Library Add 23564) at the fifteenth-century Bahmani court (1347–1...

This article examines the historical and cultural significance of cosmography in the early modern Spanish Empire, as seen in Juan de Miramontes Zuazola’s seventeenth-century epic poem, Armas antart...

The rise of Cahokia, the largest precontact Native American city north of Mexico, was precipitated by centripetal and centrifugal mobilizations of peoples, ideas, objects, and practices. To interrogate outward Cahokian movements as diasporic, I reassess relationships between Cahokia and the Angel polity on the northeastern Mississippian frontier. I approach Mississippian communities through a relational framework as ever-emerging assemblages constituted by both human and non-human actors. This framework emphasizes ethnogenesis as a process of diaspora whereby dispersed groups are in a perpetual state of community-making outside of, but in reference to, a homeland. I focus on an analysis of the Angel assemblage of Ramey Incised pottery, a power-laden Cahokian object, and determine that Angel Ramey exhibits local paste signatures in what are otherwise primarily Cahokian-style pots. Further, I contextualize artifactual connections with socio-spatial practices of Angel communities and demonstrate that aligning residential structures and communal features to a Cahokian cosmography was a principal part of community-identity-making throughout the Angel polity. Ultimately, I argue that relationships with Cahokia motivated ethnogenesis in Angel communities.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Inquisition was the institution most invested in the censorship of printed books in the Portuguese empire. Besides publishing the Indices of Forbidden Books, the Holy Office was also responsible for overseeing their implementation and ensuring their efficacy in preventing the importation, reading, and circulation of banned books. Overall, the sixteenth-century Indices condemned 785 authors and 1081 titles, including 52 authors and 85 titles of medicine, natural history, natural philosophy, astronomy, chronology, cosmography, astrology, and divinatory arts. By looking at the largest collection of early modern scientific books in Portugal, I will argue that a closer inspection of marginalia and ownership, and the establishment of a typology of expurgations is essential for the comprehension of the actual practices and the mechanisms of censorship. By examining the material evidence of censorship, in order to reconstruct expurgation practices, this paper reveals the processes and effectiveness of ecclesiastical control in the Portuguese Inquisition and highlights the differences between what inquisitors wrote in the Indices and what others put into practice.

This article analyzes the links between the first travel accounts of the New World and the production of cartographic images of America in Guillaume Le Testu’sCosmographie Universelle(1556). Produced in 1556 and dedicated to Admiral of France Gaspard de Coligny, the Norman pilot’s manuscript atlas was created in the context of growing French colonial interest inTerra Brasilis. The transposition of America’s founding narratives into cartographic images as presented in Le Testu’sCosmographieis interpreted here as an act of translationlato sensu. The translation of the continent’s travel accounts in the strictest sense of the word, and the adaptation of New World information to new audiences and political contexts are also examined in the analysis of this manuscript nautical atlas. El artículo analiza el vínculo entre los primeros relatos de viaje al Nuevo Mundo y la producción de imágenes cartográficas sobre América en laCosmografía Universaldel piloto normando Guillaume Le Testu. Dedicado al Almirante de Francia Gaspard de Coligny en 1556, el atlas manuscrito se produjo en un contexto de auge de los proyectos colonizadores franceses enTerra Brasilis. La transposición de los relatos fundacionales americanos en imágenes cartográficas tal como se presenta en el caso de Le Testu es interpretada como un acto de traducción en sentido amplio. A su vez, la traducción de los relatos de viaje en sentido estricto y la adaptación de las informaciones americanas a nuevos públicos y contextos políticos completan el estudio del atlas náutico manuscrito.

For anyone interested in the world on the cusp of the seventeenth-eighteenth century “le Pere” Coronelli (1650–1718) is simply unavoidable. He has his own learned society today (Coronelli Weltbund ...

The article presents an analysis of certain peculiarities of the Russian translation of chapters about the British Iles from the Mercator-Hondius Atlas (published in 1613). These sections were based on the historical and topographical treatise «Britannia» written by the English antiquarian William Camden (1551–1623). The translation was accomplished in Moscow, in the Ambassadorial Office, by Bogdan Lykov and Ivan Dorn, in 1637, and became known as «Mercator’s Cosmography». The comparison of the Latin text and the Russian translation reveals numerous distinctions between them, which shows difficulties the translators faced with. The variety of their problems turned to be rather broad. Also the insufficient knowledge of the Latin language, particularly of its complicated syntactic constructions, compounded their work. Lykov and Dorn had to rethink many things to bring new terms and onyms into another national context that differed from one in what they were created. Proper names, topographic objects, historical facts, terms, the structure of society, government institutions caused perplexities. As an example of this uneasy work, the evolution of the interpretation of the proper name – the name of the text's author William Camden – is examined here. A detailed analysis reveals the mechanisms of adaptation of the new onym and its incorporation to the Russian language. The situation with the interpretation of extracts about social hierarchy, political, administrative and juridical institutes of England looks more complicated. One of such examples is the problem of the interpretation of the most important term for the English history – term «parliament». The difference of the perception of the parliament's functions by the English antiquarian Camden and by the Ambassadorial Office translators is clearly revealed. Lykov and Dorn found themselves in a difficult position: they had to construe this term relying on their own knowledge about English realias which in fact were very limited.

This essay-review carries out a bibliographic review of the most representative publications in the field of the history of Iberian science and the Atlantic world of the last decade, with special emphasis on cosmography, navigation and cartography, but also in the field of medicine, pharmacopoeia, natural history, and ethnography. To do so, I start examining six of the most recent books published in English, Spanish and Portuguese, without forgetting to refer to some books published in the last two decades that have somehow marked the course of the new history of the Ibero-Atlantic science. As an interpretive contribution, it is suggested that one of the points of convergence of all these studies is what we could call an empirical turn in knowledge, that is, that the diverse scientific cultures that emerged in the Ibero-Atlantic world were eminently practical cultures, and that these cultures were a constituent part of modern Europe and science.

In a previous article the watermarks in the text and map pages of the Rome editions of Ptolemy’s Cosmography were described. This article shows how they can be used to reveal hidden knowledge about the development and chronology of the 1507/8 Rome edition of Ptolemy’s Cosmography. It also discusses the discovery of new states of three maps and the appearance of the Ruysch world map in these editions. Atlases in several institutes and libraries in Europe were studied firsthand, whereas information and photographs of atlases in libraries in the United States were collected by e-mail correspondence and internet downloads.

In this paper, we expand application of our mathematical methods for translating ancient coordinates from the classical Geography by Claudius Ptolemy into modern coordinates from India and Arabia to Britain and Ireland, historically important islands on the periphery of the ancient Roman Empire. The methods include triangulation and flocking with subsequent Bayesian correction. The results of our work can be conveniently visualized in modern GIS tools, such as ArcGIS, QGIS, and Google Earth. The enhancements we have made include a novel technique for handling tentatively identified points. We compare the precision of reconstruction achieved for Ptolemy's Britain and Ireland with the precisions that we had computed earlier for his India before the Ganges and three provinces of Arabia. We also provide improved validation and comparison amongst the methods applied. We compare our results with the prior work, while utilizing knowledge from such important ancient sources as the Antonine Itinerary, Tabula Peutingeriana, and the Ravenna Cosmography. The new digital reconstruction of Claudius Ptolemy's Britain and Ireland presented in this paper, along with the accompanying linguistic analysis of ancient toponyms, contributes to improvement of understanding of our cultural cartographic heritage by making it easier to study the ancient world using the popular and accessible GIS programs.

The voyages of exploration and discovery during the period of European maritime expansion and the immense amount of information and artefacts they produced about our knowledge of the world have maintained a difficult, if not non-existent, relationship with the main historiographical lines of the history of early modern science. This article attempts to problematize this relationship based on a historical account that seeks to highlight the scientific and institutional mechanisms that made the Magellan-Elcano voyage, the first modern voyage, possible. The text argues that this voyage was the first modern voyage because it allowed the construction of a new scientific and cartographic image of the globe and contributed to our understanding of the world as a global world, altering the foundations on which modern European economic and geographic thought was based. In that sense, the voyage was something extraordinary, but not completely unexpected. It responded to a complex process of expansionary policy and technical development that dated back to the 15th century, which in 1519 was sufficiently articulated to carry out a great feat, Construyendo una imagen global del mundo: ciencia, cosmografía y navegación en tiempos de la primera circunnavegación, 1492-1522.— Los viajes de exploración y de descubrimiento de la época de la expansión marítima europea y la enorme cantidad de información y artefactos que produjeron sobre nuestro conocimiento del mundo han mantenido una difícil relación, por no decir inexistente, con las principales líneas historiográficas de la historia de la ciencia moderna. Este artículo intenta problematizar dicha relación a partir de un relato histórico que pretende destacar los mecanismos científicos e institucionales que hicieron posible el viaje de Magallanes-Elcano, el primer viaje moderno. El texto sostiene que este viaje fue el primer viaje moderno no solo porque permitió la construcción de un mapa global del mundo, de una nueva imagen científica y cartográfica del globo, sino porque además contribuyó a nuestra comprensión del mundo como un mundo global, alterando los cimientos sobre los que se sustentaba el pensamiento económico y geográfico de la Europa moderna. En ese sentido, el viaje fue algo extraordinario, pero no completamente inesperado. Respondía a un complejo proceso de política expansionista y desarrollo técnico que se remontaba al siglo XV y que en 1519 estaba lo suficientemente articulado como para llevar a cabo una gran gesta

The authors conducted a study to describe the watermarks appearing in the text and map pages of the early Rome editions of Ptolemy’s Cosmography in order to date individual maps. They visited several institutions and libraries in Europe in person to study the atlases. Information and photographs concerning their atlases from institutions and libraries in the United States were collected by email correspondence. Information on some atlases was found directly on the internet. The conclusion is that each edition is characterized by its own specific watermarks. Photographs of all the watermarks found in each edition are displayed in this article.

An intriguing anonymous cosmographical work appears in a range of Byzantine and Slavic manuscripts dating from the 14th to the 16th centuries. This brief text -from three to eight folios depending on the codex- departs from other Byzantine scholarly works published at the time by upholding, rather curiously among other things, that the earth was oval, in the shape of an egg. Judging by the number of manuscripts -more than forty manuscripts for the Byzantine and Slavic world together- this cosmography was popular. The manuscript tradition is rather complex, however. Several versions of the text circulated and appear in a variety of manuscript contexts, from astronomical to ascetic compilations. Two of these ascetic codices will be the primary focus of this analysis: the Byzantine codex Scorialensis Φ III-11 (14th century) and the Serbian Miscellany of Gorica, or Goricki Zbornik (1441/1442). These manuscripts have been selected for several reasons. Firstly, the presence of a cosmographical text in an asceti...

Pragmatic cognitive science, rooted in Dewey's epistemology and models of distributed cognition, offers new hypotheses for the emergence and decline of the Mithraic rites. These models foreground the responsiveness of the rites to their economic and social environment, generating new form-meaning pairs through multimodal engagements inside the Mithraic caves. These moments of cognitive blending answered the needs of the early social catchment of the rites, which was predominantly freedmen and soldiers benefitting from the upward mobility of the thriving second century CE. Within the caves, multimodal engagements with the triumph of light over dark physical movement, imagery, gesture, role playing, and interaction with cult equipment - aligned the experience of the initiate with Mithras' cosmological triumph. The caves are also a confluence of mechanisms for social mobility that were broadly familiar in the imperial period, including patronage, symposia, engagement with exotic cultural forms and philosophical speculation. The decline of the rites was coincident with the dissolution of the economic opportunities that enabled the rise of the Roman middle class and of the social currency of these practices. The language of euergetism yielded to the language of service to the poor, and the cosmological imagery that characterized the caves shifted into the restricted spheres of exchange among competing princes. This model of the rites suggests dynamics with Christianity focused less on theology than on responsiveness to the economic and social transformations. Keywords: pragmatic cognitive science, cosmology, Mithras. On cover:Monks singing the Office and decorated initial A[sperges me.]. Gradual Olivetan Master (Use of the Olivetan Benedictines), illuminated manuscript on parchment ca. 1430-1439. Italy, Monastero di Santa Maria di Baggio near Milan, Ca 1400-1775.Beinecke Ms1184: The olivetan Gradual. Gradual. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.