Alessandro Scafi

Maps of Paradise is a distillation of Alessandro Scafi’s larger 2006 work Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth. Gone are pages of explanatory text, numerous examples, scores of black-and-white illustrations, and scholarly apparatus like endnotes. In their stead is a shortened book with enough verve for a wider audience yet enough scholarship for students and academics. In nine chapters Scafi—lecturer in medieval and Renaissance cultural history at the Warburg Institute, University of London—demonstrates how the idea of paradise was conceived, illustrated, and mapped from ancient times to the present. Each chapter contains several sections of exposition with an array of images, a “Visual Interlude” discussing a particular (and exemplar) map in more detail, and, finally, a short bibliographic essay. The result is a visually impressive and thought-provoking study showing how people perceived, situated, and mapped Eden over time.

Scafi ends his book with a short meditation on maps of Thomas More’s Utopia and the popularity of a good place (“Eu-topia”) that is also no place (“u-topia”), i.e. paradise. Scafi’s contention is that the cartography of paradise reveals more about the cultural and intellectual lives of the peoples involved in mapping the place than it does about Eden itself. Maps of Paradise is another in a long line of works that portray maps not as just illustrations but cultural artifacts. Because the notion of paradise is so long lived in Western thought, Scafi is able to write both an intellectual history and a history of cartography following one idea through time. Maps of Paradise serves as a wonderful and colorful adjunct to those who already have his similar 2006 work Mapping Paradise; it is a great introduction for those who are unfamiliar with Scafi’s earlier work.… (meer)