ARTH 572B/ SOC 690H/ COLI 535R/ MDVL 501B

Charles Burroughs, Art History and Medieval Studies, and Dale Tomich, Sociology and Fernand Braudel Center

cburrou and dtomich@binghamton.edu

Contemporary talk about "globalization" may well seem appropriate in an era of global corporations and global flows of labor, capital, and digitalized information, in a framework still characterized by the earlier emergence of interregional trading systems and projections of imperial power. Current representations of the world as one, however, are far from transparent to a given state of affairs. In their character as ideologically highly charged representations, it is useful to consider them in the context of older ideas of universalism, often of great antiquity, that drew authority from the convergence of conceptions about the cosmos and about the inhabited world, or at least of symbolically crucial locations within it.

Perhaps also informed, on some level, by the existence of a "5,000 year old world system" (Frank and Gills), such ideas often found powerful expression in visual documents, like the cartographic representations of several premodern cultures. The world maps of medieval Europe are especially well known images of this type; until recently regarded as of mere symbolic validity, medieval maps now suggest ways to understand the symbolic and ideological aspect of the products of "scientific" cartography. Further, globalizing regimes mark the spaces in which they assert dominion with strategic markers or signs of a consistent and coherent exercise of power. The corporate towers, sports arenas, and highway systems of current "world cities" echo the triumphal arches and temples of Roman cities, or the planimetric and formal constants of the shrines of religions with universal claims.

In this course we will explore current and historical conceptions of the Global, giving particular attention to the nature and extent – or even existence -- of the epistemological break between "premodern" and "modern" modes of thought and representation. We will consider not only intellectual constructions of globality or universality, but also physical sites (constructions as buildings, even) in which such representations are mobilized in the interest of political and cultural hegemony. That is, we wish to understand representation both as a practice in relation to the process of globalization and as an arena and even instrument of globalization.

This is a highly experimental course, and the syllabus is and will probably remain quite fluid, as well as responsive to students’ interests. All participants will prepare reports on readings for most sessions, depending on enrollment, and write a paper. We will work with and to an extent as the Global Studies Workshop (one of the dean’s "Chicago Workshops"). So far, three eminent visiting speakers have agreed to participate: James Muldoon, Thomas Cummins, Janet Abu Lughod.

Jan. 25 Introduction. The Finite World and Cosmic Order: Symbolic Languages of Cartographic Representation (CB)

Kupfer, "Medieval world maps; embedded images, interpretive frames."

Harvey, A mappa mundi: the Hereford world map.

Edson, Mapping time and space: how medieval mapmakers viewed their world.

Woodward, "Medieval mappaemundi."

Harley, "Silences and secrecy: the hidden agenda of cartography in early modern Europe."

For general overview:

Thrower, Maps and civilization: cartography in culture and society.

Whitfield, The image of the world: 20 centuries of world maps. (excellent illustrations)

Feb 1 Cosmography, Cartography, Politics,and the Power of Imagery (CB)

Kupfer, "The lost wheel map of Ambrogio Lorenzetti."

Frugoni, A distant city: images of urban experience in the medieval World..Ch.6 "Images too beautiful: reality perfected" pp.118-188

Partridge and Starn, Arts of power: three halls of state in Italy, 1300-1600. Part 1. "The republican regime of the Sala dei Nove in Siena, 1338-1340" pp.11-59

Edgerton, The heritage of Giotto's geometry: art and science on the eve of the scientific revolution.

Feb 8 Cosmic/Global Constructions and Deconstructions at a Transitional Moment: Machiavelli and Michelangelo: (CB)

NOTE: This will involve discussion of a paper CB is giving at the Visual Arts Workshop (Wednesday, Feb. 2)

Feb 15 The Cosmic Body: Microcosmic Metaphors and Imagery

Wright, "The macrocosm and the microcosm," in Cosmology in antiquity, ch.4, pp.56-74.

Heninger, The cosmographical glass: Renaissance diagrams of the universe. Ch.1-4, esp. 4.

Barkan, Nature's work of art: the human body as image of the world. 1 Natural philosophy: the human body and the cosmos, pp.8-60; 2 The human body and the commonwealth, pp.61-115; 3 The human body, esthetics, and the constructions of man, pp.116-174.

Lincoln, Myth, cosmos, and society: Indo-European themes of creation and destruction, esp. pp.5-33.

Jordan, "The household and the state: transformations in the representation of an analogy."

O’Neill, Five bodies: the human shape of modern society, Introduction. Our two bodies, pp.15-25; Ch. 1 The world’s body, pp.26-47; Ch.2 Social bodies, pp.48-66

Sennett, Flesh and stone: the body and the city in Western civilization.

Synnott, The body social: symbolism, self and society.

Feb 22 The Cosmic Body: Spatial and Architectural Applications

Wittkower, Architectural principles in the age of humanism, The centrally planned church and the Renaissance, pp.3-32, esp. ch. 1,2,5; Principles of Palladio’s architecture, pp.57-100, esp. ch.1,2.

Summers, "Michelangelo on architecture."

Burroughs, "The building's face and the Herculean paradigm: agendas and agency in Roman Renaissance architecture."

Burroughs, "Michelangelo at the Campidoglio: artistic identity, patronage, and manufacture."

Rykwert, The idea of a town: the anthropology of urban form in Rome, Italy and the ancient world.

(It would be appropriate to include non-western examples here – Angkor, perhaps, or some of the S. Indian temple complexes or traditional Chinese settlements. Another possibility would be the "cosmological" layout of non-monumental settlements and even dwellings in certain cultures – villages of certain African peoples, or the hogan of the Navajo)

Feb 29 The Age of Conquest: Cartographies and Ideologies

Cosgrove, The Palladian landscape: geographical change and its cultural representations in sixteenth-century Italy. "Measuring and picturing the land," pp.163-187; "The Euclidian ecstasy: describing and transforming the great machine of the world," pp.188-217; "Landscape as theater" pp.189-250.

Burroughs, "Absolutism and the rhetoric of topography: streets in the Rome of Sixtus V."

Edgerton, "From mental matrix to mappaemundi to Christian empire: the heritage of Ptolemaic cartography in the Renaissance."

Lestrignant, Mapping the Renaissance world: the geographical imagination in the age of discovery. Overture: Renaissance and cartography, pp.1-11; The cosmographical model, p.12-36; Cartographies: an experience of the world and an experiment on the world, pp.104-125; Epilogue: the end of cosmography

Brotton, "Terrestrial globalism: mapping the globe in early modern Europe."

Pagden, Lords of all the world: ideologies of empire in Spain, Britain and France, c.1500-c.1800. The legacy of Rome, pp.11-28; Monarchia universalis, pp.29-62; Conquest and settlement, 63-102

Muldoon, The Americas in the Spanish world order: the justification for conquest in the seventeenth century. The law of Christian-infidel relations: the Spanish title to the New World," pp.15-37; To civilize the barbarian – the anthropology and the history pp.38-65; The mechanics of political evolution – the Natural Law, pp.78-95

Markman, "The gridiron plan and the caste system in colonial Central America."

March 7 Mental Universes, and the Universal Imaginary

Foucault, The order of things: an archaeology of the human sciences. The prose of the world, pp.17-45

Merchant, The death of nature: women, ecology, and the scientific revolution, Nature as female, 1-41; The world an organism, pp.99-126; The mechanical order, pp.192-215.

Ong, "From allegory to diagram in the Renaissance mind."

Vickers, "Analogy versus identity: the rejection of occult symbolism."

Yates, The art of memory. The Memory treatises, 105-128; Renaissance Memory: the Memory theater of Giulio Camillo, pp.129-159

Gilles, "Posed spaces: framing in the wage of the world picture." In Duro, Rhetoric of the frame.

March 14 Mental Universes Materialized: The Collection of the World

Findlen, Possessing nature: museums, collecting, and scientific culture in early modern Italy, Locating the museum: ‘A world of wonders in one closet shut,’ pp.17-47; Searching for paradigms, pp.48-96; Sites of knowledge, pp.97-154

Kaufmann, "From mastery of the world to mastery of nature: the Kunstkammer, politics, and science."

Lazzaro, The Italian Renaissance garden. From the conventions of planting, design, and ornament to the grand gardens of sixteenth-century Central Italy. (esp. on Boboli Grotto, Grotto at Castello).

Geest, "Mexico and South America in the European Wunderkammer." In Impey and MacGregor, The origins of museums: the cabinet of curiosities in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Europe. pp.237-46

Rykwert, The first moderns: the architects of the eighteenth century. "The marvelous and the distant," pp.54-79.

Ernst, "Framing the fragment: archaeology, art, museum." In Duro, Rhetoric of the frame.

March 16 Muldoon Lecture

March 18-26 Spring break

March 28 Humboldt and the mapping of Cuba (DT)

April 4 Thinking Infinity: Cartesian Landscapes and Projections of Western Hegemony

Dijksterhuis, The mechanization of the world picture: Pythagoras to Newton.

Weiss, Mirrors of infinity: the French formal garden and 17th-century metaphysics.

April 13 Landscapes of Labor: Cuba in the World Economy (DT)

Ortiz, Cuban counterpoint.

April 6 Tom Cummins, Ferber Memorial Lecture

April 13 Issues of Conceptualization and Periodization: World Systems Theory and Historical Representation

Frank and Gills, eds. The world system, five hundred or five thousand years,

Wallerstein, The modern world system, Vol. I, capitalist agriculture and the origins of the European world-economy in the 16th century.

On the archaeology of the notion of system:

Ong, "System, space and intellect in Renaissance symbolism."

April 20 Metropolis/Cosmopolis: The World City and/in its Representations

(provisional title; I’m hoping for guest presentations)

May 4 Janet Abu Lughod visit

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ARTH 572B/ SOC 690H/ COLI 535R/ MDVL 501B

Charles Burroughs, Art History and Medieval Studies, and Dale Tomich, Sociology and Fernand Braudel Center

Abu-Lughod, Janet L. The world system in the thirteenth century: dead-end or precursor? Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 1993. HC41 .A285 1993

Andrien, Kenneth J. and Rolena Adorno, eds., Transatlantic encounters: Europeans and Andeans in the 16th century. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1991

Barkan, Leonard, Nature’s work of art: the human body as image of the world. New Haven and London, 1975. BD450.B37

Black, Jeremy. Maps and history: constructing images of the past. New Haven, 1997. D13 .B54 1997

Cosgrove, Denis. The Palladian landscape: geographical change and its cultural representations in sixteenth-century Italy, University Park, PA, 1993. DG975.V38c67

Cosgrove, Denis, ed. Mappings. London: Reaktion Books, 1999. GA102.3 .M36 1999

Defert, Daniel. "The collection of the world: accounts of voyages from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries." Dialectical Anthropology 7 (1982): 11-20.

Dijksterhuis, Eduard J., The mechanization of the world picture: Pythagoras to Newton. Princeton, N.J., 1986 Q125 .D512 1986

Duro, Paul, ed. The rhetoric of the frame: essays on the boundaries of the artwork. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. N71R49.

Edgerton, Samuel Y. "From mental matrix tpo mappamundi to Christian empire: the heritage of Ptolemaic cartography in the Renaissance." In Woodward, Art and cartography, pp.10-50.

Edgerton, Samuel Y. The heritage of Giotto's geometry: art and science on the eve of the scientific revolution. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. N7430.5 .E34 1991.

Edson, Evelyn. Mapping time and space: how medieval mapmakers viewed their world. London, 1997. GA221.E37

Findlen, Paula. Possessing nature: museums, collecting , and scientific culture in early modern Italy, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1994, Q105.I8F56

Flint, Valerie I. J. The imaginative landscape of Christopher Columbus. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992. E112 .F57 1992

Foster, Richard. Patterns of thought: the hidden meaning of the great pavement of Westminster Abbey. London, 1991. NA5470.W5 F67 1991

Foucault, Michel. The order of things: an archaeology of the human sciences. 1971. CB78. F613.

Frank, Andre Gunder and Barry K. Gills, eds. The world system: five hundred years or five thousand? London and New York: Routledge 1993

Harley, J.B. "Silences and secrecy: the hidden agenda of cartography in early modern Europe." Imago Mundi 40 (1988): 57-76.

Harvey, P. D. A mappa mundi: the Hereford world map. Toronto, 1996. GA304.R5 H37

Helgerson, Richard, "The land speaks: cartography, chorography, and subversion in Renaissance England," Representations 16 (1986): 51-85.

Heninger, S. K. The cosmographical glass: Renaissance diagrams of the universe. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1977. QB33 .E85H46

Impey, Oliver and Arthur MacGregor, eds. The origins of museums: the cabinet of curiosities in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Europe. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985, (Oversize*) AM342 .O75.

Jaffe, Irma B., Gianni Eugenio Viola, and Franca Rovigatti, eds. Imagining the new world: Columbian iconography. Rome, 1991. E111 .I452 1991

Jordan, Constance. "The household and the state: transformations in the representation of an analogy from Aristotle to James I." MLQ 54 (1993): 307-26.

Kaufmann, Thomas D. The mastery of nature: aspects of art, science, and humanism in the Renaissance. Princeton, 1993. CB361.K36

Kupfer, Marcia. "Medieval world maps; embedded images, interpretive frames." Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry 10 (1994): 262-288

Kupfer, Marcia. "The lost wheel map of Ambrogio Lorenzetti." Art Bulletin 78 (1996): 286-310

Lazzaro, Claudia. The Italian Renaissance garden. From the conventions of planting, design, and ornament to the grand gardens of sixteenth-century Central Italy. New Haven and London, 1990.

Lestrignant, Frank, Mapping the Renaissance world: the geographical imagination in the age of discovery. Berkeley, 1994.

Lincoln, Bruce. Myth, cosmos, and society: Indo-European themes of creation and destruction. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1986. BL660 .L45 1986

Lindberg, David C. and Robert S. Westman, eds. Reappraisals of the scientific revolution. New York and Cambridge, 1990. Q125.R34

McCluskey, Stephen C. Astronomies and cultures in early medieval Europe. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. QB23 .M43 1998

Merchant, Carolyn. The death of nature: women, ecology, and the scientific revolution. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983. Q130 .M47

Mukerji, Chandra. Territorial ambitions and the gardens of Versailles. Cambridge and New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1997. DC126 .M85 1997

Muldoon, James. The Americas in the Spanish world order: the justification for conquest in the seventeenth century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. F1411.S6973 M85 1994

Ong, Walter J. "From allegory to diagram in the Renaissance mind," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 17 (1959): 423-440.

Ong, Walter J. The barbarian within, and other fugitive essays and studies. New York, 1962. PN511 .O58

Ortiz, Fernando. Cuban counterpoint; tobacco and sugar. New York, A.A. Knopf, 1947

HD9144 .C9O72 (reissued by Durham, NC: Duke University Press)

Pagden, Anthony. Lords of all the world: ideologies of empire in Spain, Britain and France, c.1500-c.1800. New Haven, 1995. JC359.P278

Partridge, Loren and Randolph Starn, Arts of power: three halls of state in Italy, 1300-1600, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992. NA6815 .S787 1992

Rykwert, Joseph. The idea of a town: the anthropology of urban form in Rome, Italy and the ancient world. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976. HT166 .R94

Rykwert, Joseph. The first moderns: the architects of the eighteenth century. Cambridge, MA., 1980.

Rykwert, Joseph. "Body and mind." In Storia delle Idee, Problemi e Prospettive, Seminario Internazionale, Roma, 29-31 ottobre 1987, ed. Massimo L. Bianchi. Rome: Edizioni dell'Ateneo, 1989.

Simek, Rudolf. Heaven and earth in the Middle Ages: the physical world before Columbus. Woodbridge, Suffolk, and Rochester, NY, 1996. BD495.5.S5513 1996

Synnott, Anthony. The body social: symbolism, self and society. London and New York, 1993. GN298 .S94 1993

Thrower, Norman J. W.. Maps and civilization: cartography in culture and society. Chicago, Ill., 1996. GA201 .T47 1996

Vickers, Brian. ed., Occult and scientific mentalities in the Renaissance, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984. BF1429 .O26 1984, 1984

Wallerstein, Immanuel. The modern world system, Vol. I, capitalist agriculture and the origins of the European world-economy in the 16th century. San Diego and New York: Academic Press, 1974.HC45 .W35 1974

Weiss, Allen S. Mirrors of infinity: the French formal garden and 17th-century metaphysics. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995. SB457.65 .W4513 1995

Whitfield, Peter. The image of the world: 20 centuries of world maps. San Francisco, 1994. GA201 .W48 1994

Wittkower, Rudolf. Architectural principles in the age of humanism, revised ed., London: Tiranti, 1988. NA520.W5

Woodward, David. "Reality, symbolism, time, and space in medieval world maps." Annals of the Association of American Geographers 75 (1985): 510-21.

David Woodward, ed., Art and cartography: six historical essays, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. GA108 .A78 1987

Woodward, David and J.B. Harley, eds. The history of cartography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, vol.1 (Oversize) (*) .GA201 .H53 1987

Wright, M. Rosemary. Cosmology in antiquity. London and New York, 1995. BD495.W75

Yates, Frances A. The art of memory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966. BF381 .Y3 1966

Zöllner, Frank. Vitruvs Proportionsfigur: Quellenkritische Studien zur Kunstliteratur im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert. Worms: Werner, 1987.NA 2760.Z64

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