Islands in Flux: Migration and Ecological Change in Early Modern Isolari (Books of Islands)

Abstract

THE GENRE OF BOOKS known as isolari (books of islands) enjoyed remarkable popularity among European and Mediterranean readers between the fi fteenth and seventeenth centuries. The genre, born circa 1420 with Cristoforo Buondelmonti ’ s account of the Aegean archipelago entitled Liber insularum archipelagi , examines individual islands in turn via heterogeneous assemblages of text and image. The period when the genre took shape was an important one for geographical thought and cartography: techniques for map projection and the plotting of locations via an abstract coordinate grid were being newly elaborated and applied, thanks to the rediscovery of Ptolemy ’ s Geography by Italian humanists around the turn of the fi fteenth century. Yet the isolari largely eschew these quantitative and technical approaches, instead presenting their subject matter through miscellaneous collec-tions of maps and navigational aids, travel narratives and advice for wayfarers, ar-chaeology and epigraphy, poetry and mythology, ancient history and current events, natural history and ethnography. The success of the isolari thus poses a challenge to teleological narratives suggesting that the rediscovery of Ptolemy ’ s Geography swiftly ushered in a broad and decisive shift toward quantitative approaches to mapping; for much of the early modern period the hybrid isolario