GRE Practice Test 9

For generations, historians of cartography told the story of their subject as a steady march toward accuracy. Medieval world maps such as the large mappae mundi that hung in cathedrals, with Jerusalem at their center and east at the top, were treated as charming failures, the products of an age that let religious belief override observation. Progress, on this account, arrived with the recovery of Ptolemy’s system of coordinates, the spread of printed sea charts, and eventually the national surveys of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, whose triangulated grids were taken as the standard against which every earlier map should be measured. A map’s worth lay in how closely it approximated the shape of the land as a modern survey would record it, and maps that failed this test were catalogued chiefly as evidence of what their makers did not yet know.

In the late twentieth century, a number of scholars began to argue that this narrative misunderstood what maps had been made to do. The mappae mundi, they observed, were never intended to guide travelers; they compressed sacred history, legend, and geography into a single image meant for contemplation, and judging them by the standards of navigation was rather like faulting a stained-glass window for admitting too little light. These scholars went further, insisting that even the most rigorous modern maps embody choices—what to name, what to omit, which direction to place at the top, whose boundaries to draw—that reflect the interests of the institutions commissioning them, whether churches, trading companies, or states. On this view, every map is an argument as well as a record, and the historian’s task is to recover the purposes it served rather than to grade its precision.

The newer approach has widened the field considerably, but it carries risks that its proponents have not always acknowledged. To call every map an argument can make it difficult to say why some maps are better than others, and few historians would be comfortable concluding that a sixteenth-century chart that wrecked ships was merely expressing a different set of values. In addition, the documents that would reveal why a particular map was made are often missing; for most surviving medieval maps we know neither who drew them nor who paid for them, so the purposes attributed to them are frequently inferred from the maps themselves. Scholars who describe “the intentions of the mapmaker” may therefore be reading back into an object the very meanings they have set out to find. The lesson is not that accuracy should once again become the sole measure of a map, but that claims about purpose require the same evidentiary discipline that the older historians applied to claims about coastlines.