The Typological Imaginary. Kathleen Biddick

the Ptolemaic treatise. On folio 2r of this edition the Ptolemaic regions were alphabetized (from Achaia to Vindelicia), after which the relevant book, chapter, and map number were listed for each regional name. This edition also alphabetized the place-names of each region at the end of each book and then listed the respective longitude and latitude. The maps for each region were placed after each book. This editorial apparatus thus used the different chapter or “book” divisions as its basic organizational unit and alphabetized information with reference to each of its books.⁵¹

      Figure 6. Letter A from the Damianus Moyllus alphabet, Parma. As reproduced in Stanley Morison, ed., The Moyllus Alphabet: A Newly Discovered Treatise on Classic Letter Design Printed at Parma c. 1480 (New York: Pegasus, 1927).

      The 1486 edition of the Geography printed at Ulm (the second edition to be printed north of the Alps) shows the treatise on the way to becoming an atlas, a cartographic genre that would achieve its full commercial success in the sixteenth century. This edition is notable for several reasons. First, like all previous editions including its prototype, the 1482 Ulm edition, it is printed in Roman type, the typeface of choice for “scientific” texts.⁵² (The mathematician Regiomontanus and Hermann Schedel of Nuremberg had just introduced the typeface to German presses north of the Alps.⁵³) The printer of the 1486 Ptolemy recycled the woodcut maps of the 1482 edition, but made significant additions to the front and back matter of the volume. Most importantly, elaborating on and significantly rearranging the editorial aids of Berlinghieri, the 1486 Ulm Ptolemy included an alphabetized register of places, Registrum alphabeticum super octo libros Ptolomaei as prefatory material to the Geography. This Registrum was compiled from each of the indices of the regional books (Books 2–7) and was accompanied by cross-listings of the number of the map on which the place could be located. A brief descriptive annotation accompanied many of the alphabetized places.⁵⁴ Thenceforth, editions of the Geography would travel with front and back matter.⁵⁵ This seemingly mundane Registrum alphabeticum had powerful, if unintended, effects as an editorial apparatus. By alphabetizing all places without regard to the book-by-book regional divisions, this edition stripped the Geography of time, the timing of reading and browsing through the treatise. It superimposed instead an alphabetical list, or grid, onto a cartographic grid of longitude and latitude.⁵⁶ Readers could locate the name of a place in the alphabetic list at the front of the volume and then could simply turn to the relevant map at the back of the volume to verify its cartographic location. The alphabetical list of places and map references meant that it was no longer necessary, as it had been prior to their introduction, to peruse the chapters of the Geography in order to link a place with a map. By the time of publication of the Strassburg edition of 1513, this editorial tool had reached its empirical minimalism in the form of a long list of alphabetized places (culled from the Ptolemaic maps) and cross-listed with their longitude and latitude (Figure 7). The effect of this apparatus was to make the Geography work like an atlas before the production of atlases (a phenomenon of the mid-sixteenth century).

      In addition, the 1486 Ptolemy is also the first edition to append a short treatise after the maps entitled “on three parts of the world and the various men, portents and transformations with rivers, islands and mountains.” Using excerpts from the work of Isidore and Vincent of Beauvais, it offered readers familiar encyclopedic fare typically associated with mappaemundi.⁵⁷ In sum, the 1486 Ptolemy layers a range of complex material: Roman typeface as signifier of the “scientific” content of the Geography, an alphabetized register of places cross-referenced to their respective maps (a tool that enables the book to work more like an atlas), and finally, a seemingly atavistic encyclopedic tract on the wonders of the world.

      The Registrum, so conceived, marked the use of alphabetization as an increasingly effective indexing tool for cartography. The alphabet grid indexed to longitude and latitude produced a matrix with ramifications for processes of detemporalization under discussion in this essay.⁵⁸ It might be argued that since Ptolemaic maps did not grid apocalyptic space, that they would seem to arrest processes of detemporalization. Indeed, by “cleansing” cartographical space of the apocalypse and by cleansing the alphabet of the overdetermined territorial coding noted in the Travels, Ptolemaic maps might be understood as agents of amnesia that erased evidence of a troubling history of detemporalizing Jews—the entangled layers so far discussed of Gog and Magog, the Hebrew alphabet, and the Hebrew language. In pondering this, it is important to remember that Ptolemaic maps did not circulate in isolation from other humanist projects. These maps need to be considered in terms of new arguments about philology made in Christian-Hebrew studies.

      Figure 7. First page of alphabetical register of places and coordinates from Ptolemy, Geographie opus nouissima traductione (Argentina). Courtesy of the Rare Books Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lennox, and Tilden Foundations.

       Classical Christianity and the “Classic” Jew