Chapter 10 Synchronizing the Holy Land: Sacred and Secular Cartography after the Reformation

Abstract

After the Renaissance rediscovery or reinvention of Ptolemaic geography, cartography was defined by its task of projecting the round globe on a flat plane. Its main objective was to provide exact information about the locations, distances, and proportions of the physical world. This was a radical break from the medieval mappae mundi, maps that showed simultaneously a physical, temporal, and spiritual world, centered on Jerusalem. With the new geography and cartography, the world lost its centre – and Jerusalem lost its importance as the axis of the world map – or so it may seem. This chapter discusses the complex exchanges between sacred and secular geography in the early modern period and argues that with the rise of an apparently purely spatial cartography, maps of the Holy Land remain connected to sacred geography and consequently to the Jerusalem code in discrete, but important ways.