The Mantle of the Earth: Genealogies of a Geographical Metaphor
Abstract
Book Reviews Edited by Ronald E. Grim and Thomas Horst The Mantle of the Earth: Genealogies of a Geographical Meta- impression of Christ’s visage, so the vellum mappings phor. By Veronica della Dora. Chicago: The University of embodied ‘the Creator’s imprint on the world’. Chicago Press, 2021. ISBN 978-0-226-74129-1. Pp. 416, A central argument shows how these metaphors illus. US $65.00 (cloth). shifted with the incipience of modernity. Ancient cul- tures, della Dora writes, imagined cosmic mantles ‘wrap- In this searching and erudite book, Veronica della Dora ping and sheltering the earth’. From the seventeenth traces a basic metaphorical figure through which cultures century, though, these veils were increasingly sundered have imagined and made sense of earthly space: the by an interrogative Baconian gaze. Wrapping metaphors mantle, meaning a cloak, cloth or textile covering. gave way to unveiling or tearing. In Renaissance paint- Although currently associated with geology, the mantle ings, curtains part before maps of newly ‘discovered’ con- has long served as a poetic image for the dazzling sweep tinents (chapter 4); Enlightenment frontispieces depict and variety of the earth’s surface. This metaphor casts sexualized allegories of Nature being coercively denuded the world as an exquisitely woven cloth,