Broader in scope than the subtitle suggests, this volume deals with Venice’s role in geographical thought and exploration from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. Taken together the articles offer a kaleidoscopic view of Venice’s culture of space and cartography during a period when the European understanding of the world was changing rapidly. The reader has to invest some effort in making connections between the articles, although the process is aided by an introductory survey of the individual contributions, abstracts in English, and an index of modern authors (although an index of historical figures would have been equally, if not more, helpful). This collection brings together discussions of many important maps, texts, people, and issues. It is exciting to see the fifteenth century receiving more attention from historians of cartography and spatial thought; the volume is thus worth careful attention by scholars who read Italian and German for the insights offered by the individual articles and the many new research directions they point toward.

The majority of the articles explore Venice’s intellectual community and its various engagements with geographical thought. Patrick Gautier Dalché contrasts the work of two Venetian scholars: Pietro Tommasi, a well-connected humanist who focused on philological issues serving to explain ancient texts, and the more creative Giovanni Fontana, an Aristotelian who tried to synthesize and discriminate among geographical information from all sorts of sources, ancient and modern. Laura Federzoni’s study of the editions of Ptolemy’s Geography points similarly to the bifurcated reception of the text from the more critical and cartographic (including the move to include modern maps) to the more humanist and philological, the second of which she sees as the framework for the Venetian editions of the sixteenth century. Daria Perocco explores the ways in which the circle around Pietro Bembo, with its commitments to humanist Latin, nonetheless encouraged the publication of Ramusio’s travel accounts in Italian, while also embracing the experience of the maker (specifically the important cartographer Girolamo Gastaldi). Venice’s web of Mediterranean connections is the background to Giampiero Bellingeri’s assessment of the so-called Hadji Ahmed world map as a Venetian product, masquerading as the work of a Muslim North African. This fabrication reminds us of Venice’s position as a meeting point between European geographic thought and the Ottomans as potential audience and market. An earlier Mediterranean context is provided by Ramon Pujades i Bataller, who explores the fate of the hybrid world map / portolan chart most likely developed in Venice in the fourteenth century as it was adapted by the cartographers of Majorca.

Two articles deal directly with important Venetian mapmakers. Klaus Anselm Vogel argues that Fra Mauro imagined the globe in Aristotelian terms as sharply divided between land and sea. Ingrid Baumgärtner offers a handlist of Battista Agnese’s atlases and argues that his maps must be seen as desirable luxury products that demonstrated the modernity and the power of their owners. Caterina Balletti offers a digital-humanities approach to three iconic Venetian texts of the period, the Jacopo de’ Barbieri map, Fra Mauro’s world map, and the Arsenal. Balletti explains a set of digital projects that have brought these historical artifacts within reach of today’s citizen-traveler. Finally, two articles explore Venice’s relation to the global exploration that changed the fundamental understanding of the world and profoundly altered Venice’s economic status. Uwe Israel looks at the psychological reactions to Venice’s loss of trade following the first Portuguese voyages to India. Benjamin Scheller points out the interplay of expectation and contingency in exploring unknown areas in Alvise Cadamosto’s Navigazioni.

The articles in this volume offer a good, if somewhat fragmented, introduction to Venice’s contributions to spatial thought and representation. It would have been helpful in the transition from conference papers to articles if the authors (or the editors in their introductory article) had been a little more systematic about referencing the existing scholarship; Cartography in the European Renaissance, edited by David Woodward (2007), is the most notable omission. The collection is, nonetheless, a rich and useful addition to the steadily growing literature on the key role played by Italians in the fifteenth century in changing the representation of the world.