Anatomy, Cartography, and the New World Body
This chapter explores a particular epistemological orientation towards the human body shared by early modern literature, anatomy, and cartography. Beginning with the confluence of anatomical and cartographical metaphors in a range of literary and visual texts, it scrutinizes pervasive and mutually sustaining analogies among the body, the land, and maps. It then tracks how the discursive intimacy between anatomy and cartography morphed from an analogical relationship into an interactive one. Through a detailed reading of anatomical illustrations, voyage illustrations, and ethnographic country, continent, and world maps, the essay demonstrates that anatomy and cartography produced a graphic idiom of the body dedicated to abstraction and a ‘logic of the grid’. In so doing, they contributed to cognitive conditions that provided the epistemological wherewithal to begin to conceptualize humans by means of classification and comparison, and to apply this systematizing (yet non-binary) habit of thought to diverse populations across the globe.