Marjo Nurminen

The Mapmakers’ World is a coffee-table–style book that aims for an educated readership, sort of a condensed, color-image–filled complement to various volumes of The History of Cartography by the University of Chicago Press. Providing aid to the author, Marjo T. Nurminen (an archaeologist by training), is her map-collecting husband Juha Nurminen (editor-in-chief) and an “expert advisory panel” consisting of names familiar to historians of maps and discoveries: Peter Barber, Evelyn Edson, Günter Schilder, and Tony Campbell. (Owen F. Witesman and Erik Miller translated the work into English from the original Finnish.) The result is a large volume of about super royal octavo size (13½″ x 10″), an inch and a half thick, with hundreds of images of maps, portraits, and other illustrations. Nurminen’s narrative history traces the cultural development of the European world map from medieval times to the seventeenth century, with forays to ancient times and the 1800s. The text rests on a wide study of the scholarly secondary literature and abounds in numerous fine color illustrations, many filling an entire page or spanning two. Though The Mapmakers’ World offers no new theses or conclusions to the seasoned map scholar, it serves as a fine introduction and adjunct to the history of European cartography and exploration.

The Mapmakers’ World is interesting, lucidly written, and elegantly illustrated with maps and images. As a refresher on the European map and its cultural meaning from the medieval to the modern era, it is grand. The illustrations are superb; Nurminen and her team have chosen many great exemplars from a number of archives. As a showpiece and a general history it is an excellent, scholarly secondary source. A comprehensive bibliography, divided by chapter, a list of images, and index round out the text. The Mapmakers’ World might serve well as a general introduction for an undergraduate cartography course, but graduate students would be better served by directly accessing the work of the scholars in the bibliography. Scholars of cartography and exploration have trod this ground before, but they would still enjoy the text and presentation.… (más)