The Travels is certainly not the first medieval text to play with alphabets; significantly for my argument, however, it produces its practices of inclusion and exclusion through their staging. It uncouples the alphabet from its acoustical/graphic modalities in order to map letters as territory itself. The letters thus become cartographic codes.44 The Travels uses the alphabet to represent the space of territory, not the time of reading and writing. Such cartographic use of alphabets actually comes from the astrolabe, which serves as the model for such coding.
Let me pause here to show how the alphabet becomes part of an astronomical machine. At the time of composing the Travels astrolabes were commonly used to tell time as Figure 4, a reproduction of a diagram from Geoffrey Chaucer’s essay on the astrolabe, illustrates. Readers of the Travels who wished to tell time with the astrolabe would find themselves using the alphabet as a code. Telling time with this instrument involved the cross-correlation of the altitude of the sun read from the rule on the backside of the astrolabe with the positioning of the rete to correspond to the date of the reading on its frontside. The pointer on the label would then fall on one of 23 capital letters of the alphabet, or a cross, which marked 15-degree increments of the 24-hour day on the outer border of the astrolabe. The user would then count off the positions of the letters to arrive at the hour of the day.45 The alphabet thus came to share in the mechanicity of the astrolabe. It was inscribed as a code on a portable object with moveable parts. The reading of the code is a repeatable procedure; and the alphabet encodes time as spatial demarcation. The Travels mobilizes the alphabet code of the astrolabe to mechanize human diversity.
So far I have suggested that the strategic invocation of scientific rationalism in the form of astronomical discourse on longitude and latitude, grounded in the use of the astrolabe, emerges at critical moments of encounter with Jews in the work of Petrus Alfonsi and Mandeville’s Travels. The Travels not only uses that strand of rationalism but also incorporates the apocalyptic cartography of the Victorines, who in spite of their purported tolerance linked Jews with the peoples of Gog and Magog and the fantasized annihilation of Christians at the hands of the Jews in the last days. The Travels goes even further. Not only does the narrator of Mandeville measure with the astrolabe, he also transfers its alphabetical code as he textualizes territory. Like the alphabetical code on the astrolabe, alphabets in the Travels are cartographical codes that excise the alphabet from the particular temporalities of reading words. Human diversity in the Travels thus becomes a kind of mechanized universalism. Only a secret, spoken language, Hebrew, escapes this coding at the cost of intolerance.46
These different “rational” moments attest to the violence that can lurk in between time and space in medieval mapping practices. I now wish to consider, at last, the printed editions of Ptolemy’s Geography, along with Christian-Hebrew studies that developed just as the Geography came to press. What might seem separate endeavors, cartography and humanist philology, I argue are intimately intertwined in intensifying detemporalization of contemporary Jews. Put another way, it is not surprising to see Christian intellectuals, such as Pico della Mirandola, deeply involved in Jewish Kabbala and Ptolemaic geography. What Michael Taussig has described for a New World colonial context as the “search for the White Indian,” I appropriate here as the “search for the classic Jew” or the “Jew of Hebrew Scripture” (that is, the pre-crucifixion Jew, not the Talmud Jew of medieval Northern Europe). By the latter part of the fifteenth century the Christian typological imaginary repetitiously incarnated the “Talmud Jew” (whom they had so radically detemporalized) into mechanical reproduction, that is, into printing itself.47
Figure 4. Illustration from Chaucer’s lesson on telling time with the astrolabe. MS Cambridge Dd.3.53. By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
The ABC of Ptolemy: The Alphabet as Territory
Changes in script and the reception of the Geography in the fifteenth century are closely bound. Humanists gridded the letters of the alphabet just as they gridded cartographic space. The difference a grid makes can be exemplified by comparing two alphabets, one dating from 1460, the alphabet of Marie de Bourgogne, and the other from 1480, known as the alphabet of Damianus Moyllus.48 This alphabet is the first printed version of an alphabet in Roman font. A manuscript treatise on the design of the Roman alphabet, written by Felice Feliciano (1460–63) at the same time as the execution of the Gothic alphabet of Marie de Bourgogne, did not make its way into print. The differences between the Gothic and Roman alphabets are starkly drawn. Compare the letter “M” of the de Bourgogne alphabet (Figure 5) with the letter “A” of the Moyllus alphabet (Figure 6). The “M” seems to pun acoustically on “M” for “mâchoire” or jaw. The jaw is drawn in the resemblance of the clitoris, the orifices burst out of the elaborated, fragmented frame of the gothic letter, as if genitals gird the dissolving ductus of this letter. The Roman letters of the Moyllus alphabet, in contrast, are “constructed” from the principles of geometry. The letter “A” features none of the acoustical punning or anthropomorphizing typical of the de Bourgogne letters. The letters of the Roman alphabet materialize within their own self-sufficient geometric grid. So constructed, Roman type effaced its own historicity to produce a timeless, monumental space, cleansed of the corporeal excess of the de Bourgogne letter.
Historians of the Roman font trace the design to the courts of the Este in Ferrara and the Gonzaga in Mantua. It is also at the Este court where astrologers approved Nicolaus Germanus’s manuscript edition of Ptolemy, which served as the exemplar for the printed Ulm editions of 1482 and 1486. Printers of an incunabular Geography consistently set the text in the Roman alphabet. Their choice of typeface, I want to argue, is more than just a “style.” Rather, the choice to print with Roman typeface complemented the refiguring of temporality encoded in the gridded cartographic space of the maps that travelled with the Geography. Let me turn to a detailed discussion of a printed edition of the Geography to expand on this claim.
Figure 5. Letter M from Marie de Bourgogne’s alphabet. As reproduced in Pierre Dumon, L’Alphabet gothique dit de Marie de Bourgogne: Reproduction du codex Bruxellensis II 845 (Antwerp: De Nederlandsche Boekhandel, 1973).
“Rediscovered” in its translation from Greek into Latin in 1405–1409, Ptolemy’s Geography presented its students with a practical guide to constructing maps on a grid of longitude and latitude and offered a list of these coordinates for over 8,000 place-names, grouped by the imperial regions current in the late antique world.49 A work much published by Italian and German printers, an edition of a Geography staked a cultural claim for the publisher’s city in trans-European print culture. Each edition of the Geography became what Lisa Jardine has termed “the basis for further collaborative attention, repersonalising and revivifying the ‘dead letter’ of the printed page.”50 The front and back matter, especially indices, began to accrete around these different printed iterations of the Geography. Such editorial elaborations changed the ways readers might read the text. Francesco