The Behaim Globe: GeoHumanities and the 15th Century

Abstract

No single text shaped the geopoetic imagination of European medieval readers more than the 14th century text The Book of John Mandeville. The Behaim globe of 1492, the oldest extant terrestrial globe, subsequently synthesized the literary style and cartographic aesthetic of Mandeville’s Travels within the equipollent grid of Ptolemaic geography. Martin Behaim, a self-styled world explorer, collaborated with Nuremberg craftspersons to create a unique “geo-edition” of the Travels in the form of a globe.

The globe simultaneously depicts a medieval worldview and an emerging spatial representation based on the projection of the second-century Greek cosmographer Claudius Ptolemy. Oriented to north and with 2,000 place names, the globe is a gazetteer of late-medieval geographic knowledge as well as an object of literary and artistic charm. The Behaim globe theorizes an oceanic, trade-based earth as well as racial and territorial conceptions of the modern era.

As the oldest extant terrestrial globe, the Behaim globe has a unique place in European cartographic history and has been studied primarily on that basis—as a transitional and hybrid cartographic object. However, the citations from Mandeville and Polo suggests the globe is also a literary text, a late medieval instantiation of GeoHumanities. The Behaim globe can be “re-read” as a fluid collaboration of geography and poetics that not only defined the late fifteenth-century but that is current in the fields of geography, literature, and spatial theory.

For a 3-D image of the globe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz8UDg6ctUc