Athanasius Kircher, a seventeenth-century German Jesuit scholar, is widely known as a learned man who dabbled in everything from geometry and mathematics to alchemy to musicology to hieroglyphics. He also produced works on topography, though this is often a less discussed area of his illustrious career. E. has produced a finely detailed commentary on Kircher's work on the topography of ancient Latium, which served as a basis for future topographical studies of the region. E.’s book sheds light on a fascinating and controversial work, which has been dismissed both by Kircher's contemporaries and later scholars. Framing his discussion of Latium is the rivalry between Kircher and Rafaello Fabretti, a churchman and antiquarian, who published a scathing review criticising Latium. E. considers whether Fabretti's critique of Kircher as a topographer is fair and whether Latium could still serve as an important reference work for historians and topographers working in the twenty-first century.
The introduction provides background on Kircher and his work leading up to the publication of Latium, including his first foray into topographical study, which focused on Tuscany. E. also contextualises Kircher's books, noting that a number of geographers had already written about the region within the wider context of Italy by the time he published Latium. However, it was Kircher who first directed his work solely on the specific region, a focus that allowed him to explore it in more detail and depth than his predecessors.
In the first chapter E. begins with an examination of the front matter of Latium, including the imagery in its frontispiece, the dedication to the newly elected Pope Clement X, Kircher's stated intentions in writing his books and his methodology. Kircher was clear he would not just focus on Rome, but on the often neglected region around it and be based on his own personal observations. He ultimately intended to describe the ancient sites and compare them with their modern counterparts. E. highlights the moralising tone of his writing, arguing that he is trying to reveal the ‘mutability and transience’ of human existence through his study of the ancient ruins of Latium (p. 27).
In Chapters 2 to 8, E. provides a detailed discussion of the five books of Latium, commenting on such things as Kircher's accuracy in his descriptions and maps and his source material, which included the Bible and various Graeco-Roman writers. He goes through Latium methodically, discussing each section in great detail, pointing out places in the text where Kircher's understanding was wrong or deficient. He compares and contrasts Kircher's accounts with those of a number of contemporary writers, many of whom Kircher himself references, such as Philip Clüver and Leandro Alberti, who had written geographical texts on Italy.
Chapter 9 examines the review of Latium by Raffaello Fabretti, Kircher's rival. E. introduces this examination with a look at Fabretti's motives and intentions in criticising Latium. E. identifies several main themes in the critique: Kircher's boast of having first-hand knowledge, his use of sources, his cartography, his criticism of other scholars and his understanding of Roman aqueducts (p. 188). E. ends the chapter with a look at Fabretti's agenda and proceeds to pick apart the review in order to judge its fairness.
E. concludes with a discussion of the legacy of Kircher's study of Latium. He argues that although much of Latium is derivative it is an important synthesis of topographical knowledge. The detail and depth of Kircher's work also adds to its relevancy, since it includes information and accounts not included in the work of earlier writers (p. 213). E. also notes the significance of Kircher's topographical study as a seminal work that inspired research in the field. His discussion of the relevancy of Latium in the historiography of topographical study and to modern scholars studying the region could have been more explicit and broad. E.’s book is rather narrowly focused on the content and seventeenth-century context of Kircher's work and the analysis of its legacy is somewhat cursory. It would have benefited from a summation of how his systematic investigation might have influenced topographical research and how his knowledge of Latium has been used or contested by modern topographers, historians and archaeologists.
The volume is extremely detailed and descriptive. It is well researched and informative and E.’s understanding of Kircher's work is substantial. One minor comment is that E. makes frequent use of overly long quotes from Kircher and his contemporaries. Pages of the book are almost entirely devoted to quotes, with perhaps only a few lines of commentary or explanation from E. While it is of course true that long passages sometimes need to be quoted in their entirety to demonstrate a point, E. is somewhat excessive in this. The longest uninterrupted quote is nearly four complete pages (pp. 52–5) and is longer than E.’s analysis of it.
E.’s prose is clear, concise and erudite. He is thorough and makes extensive use of footnotes, from author commentary to the original Latin of excerpts quoted in the book. Readers will find these notes useful in expanding on the main text. The book contains 27 high quality black-and-white images. However, the details of a few, particularly the maps, are hard to discern and this can be frustrating.
This is an interesting and informative study of Kircher's work on the topography of ancient Latium and its relevance to modern topographical and historical study of the region.
