"Cartographic Humanism is the wonderful achievement of a major critic, scholar, literary historian and multicultural thinker. With wide-ranging scholarship, philological acuteness, sensitivity to textual and poetic nuance, and enviable linguistic ease in Latin, German, Polish, French, Italian, Spanish, English and Portuguese, Katharina Piechocki offers a new understanding of the sixteenth-century cartographic invention of Europe from a pot-pourri of real and imagined borderlands. In taut analyses of writers little studied outside specialist contexts or well-known but not as mappers of a new Europe–Conrad Celtis, Maciej Miechowita, Geoffroy Tory, Girolamo Fracastoro and Luís Vaz de Camões–Piechocki tracks a cartopoietic story that 'starts' with efforts to delimit central (Germanic), eastern (Polish or 'Sarmatic') and a core (French) 'Europe' from and against indeterminate or non-existent Asian, Mediterranean and African borders, passes through attempts to establish this 'place' against an also indeterminate other–'America' or 'not-Europe, ' all intimately bound, in Fracastoro, to disease and/or its cure and to the fictive imagination, and 'ends' with Camões' nomad poetic imposition of a colonizing Mediterranean map on an age-old Indian Ocean one, a European cartography on and of the world. In the effervescent Renaissance scholarship of history as cartography Piechocki's is a splendidly compelling new voice, one, too, that lets us see hitherto silent or 'peripheral' actors as key to modern Europe's invention."
–Timothy Reiss, author of Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe
