Motion in Maps, Maps in Motion: Mapping Stories and Movement through Time

Abstract

framing may cut off certain cross-cultural lineages, the metaphor’s spiralling permutations necessitate limits. Moreover, della Dora refreshes genealogies of Western space, which emerge as more diverse and recursive than we know. I was especially taken by less-known Byzantine mantled visions (chapter 2), in which liminal veils separate the heavens and the fallen world, over which the cosmos unfurls as a vast tabernacle. Beyond its scintillating case studies, the book contributes philosophically to map studies. Della Dora stresses the doubleness of mantle metaphors, which are forever ‘bridging seen and unseen, screening off and revealing’. Whereas cartographic discourses often enrol rhetorics of objectivity and visibility, imagining mapped space through images of mantles also allows for concealment, glimpsed depths and enfolding. Succinctly put: ‘Mantles hide’, tempering cartography’s metaphysics of presence. In tracing the vicissitudes of this resonant metaphor, della Dora unfolds a sweeping history of geographical imaginations that shows indelibly how constructions of global space are bound up with the epistemological presumptions and social preoccupations of the periods in which they emerge. The book will be indispensable for cultural historians of cartography and environmental thought as well as rewarding for scholars of the specific cultural contexts that feature in the genealogies. Further, The Mantle of the Earth has resonances beyond scholarship in that it holds out alternative ways of contemplating the earth against a backdrop of global environmental change.