The History of Cartography and the History of Science

The orbis totius has long served as an icon for the sphere of the knowable; the map, in turn, became early, and has in important ways remained, a dominant archetype of human knowledge. A field for the collation of diverse measurements, a framework for ordering nature, a means of nesting multiple scales of representation, an intersection of mathematics, astronomy, chronometry, precision instrumentation, and a host of craft practices, maps in the European tradition constitute a distinctive system for apprehending the lineaments of the natural world: like science itself, they are stable but flexible, structured but expandable. The study of cartography-as practice, theory, metaphor-has been the subject of a fair bit of recent work in the history of science (one thinks here of Lesley Cormack, Jane Camerini, and James Moore, among others). There is reason to look forward to more such studies in the future.