The Cosmographer's Workshop

The cosmographer's workshop is the laborious melting pot, the dusty and noisy den from which an entire world emerged. This book retraces the genesis of the work of André Thevet (1516-1592), a geographer and cosmographer who served the Valois dynasty and, in the 'New World,' produced the book 'The Singularities of Antarctic France,' with quality documentation on the flora, fauna, and customs of the Indians of southern Brazil. Analyzing geography and cosmography, 'The Cosmographer's Workshop' shows that a civilization is judged by its maps—they reveal its perception of the Other as well as the image it forms of itself. Through their work, a new Universe is created. Cosmography is the only model that allows us to bring together the two divergent periods of a single path and two extracts from a heterogeneous work. Through it, the wandering experience of youth and the sedentary lifestyle of mature age cease to contradict each other. The man-eaters' travel accounts of the Levant and Brazil structure the immense compilation that progressively sediments around these two original tropisms. In order to fuse observation and supposed outline, Thevet's cosmographic fiction advances certain key ideas, or obsessive themes, if you will: the primacy of experience over authority, the sovereignty of a ubiquitous gaze instantly encompassing the globe, and the preference given, among sources, to the technical and "popular" writings of pilots and sailors. Like an artist's studio, Thevet's cosmography seems submerged in the mess of work in progress, studies, more or less finished sketches, and a jumble of heterogeneous objects whose use, at first glance, is not absolutely necessary. By a rare stroke of luck, Thevet's geographical site was left almost intact. Thevet thus offers the ideal circumstance to undertake an “archaeology” of geographical science in the Renaissance.