Book review: The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France; and, The Face of the Earth: Natural Landscapes, Science and Culture

Politics, and (therefore) national and personal identity, are at the core of these two publications. The analysis of the remarkable period of European (and therefore world) history during the early modern period of the 15th and 16th centuries is discussed in the first book and provides the call for the kind of topographic descriptions compiled during the early part of the 21st Century, the topic of the second book. Then as now, proliferation of technology and political change provide the background to these accounts—overtly in the first, occluded in the second.