cosmography

This is an illuminating book: Renaissance geographies, cosmographies, offer the historian unusually translucent windows into the ways in which fifteenth- and sixteenth-century people understood and interacted with their worlds, and Roberts is a subtle guide through that of Berlinghieri.

The theme of fascination and the desire to gain knowledge and understanding of the Ottoman Empire and its inhabitants continues in the final chapters as European text and imagery is explored in popular printed costume books and encyclopaedic images as seen in genealogies, histories, and cosmographies.

One feature that the epistle shares with other medieval encyclopaedias and especially with later cosmographies is that they examine the wonders of the animal realm with emphasis on the purposeful nature of creation: each species follows the form and has the faculties that suit it best.

Certainly, Pardo's interest in layered effects can be seen in some of his earlier projects, which belie any suspicion that his use of them at LACMA was primarily inspired by pre-Columbian cosmographies. Moreover, any evidence of a sensitivity to the aesthetic of the art-works on display is jarringly absent from the gathered taffeta curtains that hang halfway down each wall to meet with the top of the fiberboard panels below.

Manual knowledge refers to historical materials--folk handbooks, cosmographies, chronicles, manifestos, and so on--that have encoded moral, ethical, and practical information.

The fourth chapter offers Francis Bacon's argument for a new empirical and pragmatic history and Abraham Ortelius' representations of both modern and pilgrimage cosmographies. The fifth and sixth chapters trace the conflicted development of a skeptical empiricism beyond faith that Samuel Purchas underwent through various editions that revised, extended, and added to Hakluyt's collections.