Sean Roberts, Printing a Mediterranean World: Florence, Constantinople and the Renaissance of Geography, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2013, 336 pages, $ 49.95, £ 36.95, hardback. ISBN 9780674066489.

The focus of Sean Roberts’s excellent Printing a Mediterranean World is a single Italian book, a poetic re-rendering of Ptolemy’s Geography, published in 1482 by the Florentine humanist Francesco Berlinghieri. Roberts is aware that Berlinghieri’s book has normally been framed as an oddity of no great significance. Beautiful, yes, but of dubious worth both as a print artefact and a geographical description. Why then, return to Berlinghieri? As Roberts points out with compelling historical acumen, Berlinghieri’s Geographia in fact crystallises important truths about geography, about the world of print, and—moving from text to context—thereby provides an important window onto the culture of the Florentine (and thence the Italian) Renaissance more generally.

Roberts’s first substantive chapter addresses what Berlinghieri discloses about the culture of geographical writing in the Renaissance. As he summarises, in the Renaissance, the geographer was ‘a distinctive blend of mathematician, poet and mapmaker’ (page 46). Simply put, a modern sense of how to bound the task of a geographical description does not adequately delimit the Renaissance conception of the project. Berlinghieri travelled in the ambit of Florentine Platonism as articulated by Ficino, who admired his work. As such, the moral and the aesthetic were as central to geographical description as was cartography. Morally, Roberts shows that ‘Renaissance geography was an emphatically Christian discipline’ (page 50), and in Berlinghieri’s case this is exemplified by the fact that his geographical output came alongside a profound engagement with Dominican culture and the ongoing composition of sermons. Aesthetically, the Geographia took Dante’s motif of having the poet guided by Virgil and reworked this in a geographical context by structuring the text as a conversation between Berlinghieri as a geographic ‘modern’ and Ptolemy as his revered ancient model. As such, the Renaissance geographer sought an active engagement with and re-staging of ancient geographical achievements, not merely to produce a literal translation. In consequence, Berlinghieri peppered his poetic geographical description with modern interventions, bringing Ptolemy up to date by drawing on authors such as Flavio Biondo. It is because of these interventions that Berlinghieri has been neglected as an eccentric byway in the history of geographical thought, where Roberts neatly uses the self-same characteristics to insist on his representativeness as a denizen of Italian geographical culture in the age of the Renaissance.

Roberts follows on to look at what Berlinghieri discloses about the culture of print at the historical moment when print and manuscript cultures interacted most fluidly. Where we tend to think of print as allowing for the production of numerous identical iterations of the same copy of the text, Roberts shows that the many extant copies of Berlinghieri’s book are all different one from another. Much of this relates to the hand colouring of maps, a phenomenon well known to historians of cartography, but Roberts is on more novel ground in analysing the ways in which ambitious geographical publishing projects such as Berlinghieri’s, because they were ideal as gifts, came to exhibit  multiple unique manuscript incipits and title pages aimed at their powerful recipients. Contrary to simplistic depictions of a ‘print revolution’, then, the print history of Berlinghieri’s Geographia suggests that ‘early humanist books were often conceived by their printers and authors as projects for multiple, individuated books rather than as uniform editions’ (page 90). Furthermore, Roberts also points out that another feature of the Geographia which has led to the condescension of posterity—its poor quality as a print product—also sheds important light onto the culture of geographical publishing at this time. Scholars have long since noted the numerous typographical and engraving errors in Berlinghieri, but, as Roberts points out, they should be seen as eloquent testimony to an era in which the sophistication of Northern European printing skills was still a rare and valuable commodity in Italy. Printers jealously guarded printing skills, resulting in books emerging from the less advanced print houses which contained basic errors. Just as the development of the modern, uniform ‘edition’ was still a way off in the late fifteenth century, so was the widespread dissemination of print skills, especially in the context of images and maps, making geographical documents such as Berlinghieri’s especially valuable as windows onto the history of print culture in the Renaissance.

Roberts lays great stress on the interconnectedness of the cultures of the Ottoman empire and the emergent Italianate Renaissance, thereby opening up to scrutiny current revisionist scholarship which has questioned Eurocentric narratives of the Renaissance in favour of a more cosmopolitan and materialist reading of these events. Scholars in Florence were well aware of (and drew civic pride from) the ways in which Ptolemy’s Geography had been brought back to their city by refugees from Constantinople and equally saw in their geographical products such as Berlinghieri’s Geographia an appropriate gift for Ottoman dignitaries which could bridge cultural divide by flowing in the reverse direction. And yet, as Roberts’s final chapter points out, simple ‘modern’ messages of hybridity and cultural diversity only tell part of the story; Berlinghieri’s Geographia, in part due to its Christian message, also encoded a hostility to the religion and political culture of the Ottoman empire, this even in the self-same copies which were intended as gifts to that empire. Just as notions of the geographer and the book were in a liminal phase, so were notions of tolerance which modern scholars all too easily read proleptically in terms of modern liberal desiderata.

Scrupulously researched and engagingly written, Printing a Mediterranean World is a wonderful addition to the Anglophone literature about Renaissance intersections between print and geography. By virtue of its precise focus on just one text, it is able to unpick simplistic narratives told at these intersections and give us a more nuanced, ambivalent reading of the role of Renaissance geography in any putative trajectory towards the present day.