Correctly orientated

Jerry Brotton is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University of London and to judge from his page on Wikipedia a bit of an intellectual pop star in England with quite a lot of radio and television programmes to his credit. He is the author of The Renaissance: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2006), which pleasingly sets his direction as a Renaissance historian in that he very much emphasises that the Renaissance was not just a North Italian or European occurrence but involved global cross cultural influences. 

Brotton is a very prolific author, who according to Wikipedia:

… writes about literature, history, material culture, trade, and east-west relations, particularly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He employs interdisciplinary approaches, looking at art, politics, history, travel writing and literature. 

Several of his publications concern map making and it was through his best seller  History of the World in Twelve Maps (Allen Lane, 2012) has been translated into twelve languages and was accompanied by a three-part series on BBC Radio4, that I first came across him.

An excellent book if I may say so. One strong point of the book is in explaining that contrary to modern popular belief north does not have to be at the top of a map. In fact, at different times in different cultures maps could and did have other orientations. Medieval European Mappa Mundi, for example, had east at the top, i.e. they were truly orientated, and medieval Islamic maps had south at the top. I wrote a whole blog post about this topic that borrowed heavily from Brotton’s book.

Brotton has now taken this theme and expanded it as the subject of his most recent book, Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction.^[1] 

According to the acknowledgements a book that started life as another series on BBC Radio 4. The opening chapter Orientation open rather surprisingly with NASA’s Blue Marble, the first picture of the complete earth taken by astronauts. Brotton explains that the original image had the south pole at the top and that NASA flipped the picture when then published it because people were used to north being at the top.

Brotton goes on to explain, as I did above,  that although most modern maps have north at the top this was by no means standard in earlier times and other cultures. He then explains that the cardinal points although actually arbitrary are defined rather naturally. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west and the position of the sun at mid-day defines the north south line. At mid-day in the northern hemisphere the sun in due south and in the southern hemisphere due north. Thus, the sun on its daily journey defines the four cardinal points. 

Brotton now explains that north, south, east, and west are words and that then can and do take on other meanings in other contexts. He uses the Wittgensteinian term language games to describe the numerous verbal contexts that the four words can appear in with a wide variety of meanings. He gives a very strong example in that the oldest use of the four cardinal directions on a Mesopotamian map actually refers to wind directions, a usage that became common throughout history. The introduction closes with a fairly long look at the story of the compass, an instrument for determining cardinal directions.

There follows a few words on the order in which the four cardinal directions are enunciated, as opposing pairs, north-south, east-west, clockwise, north, south, east, west, or the Chinese way east, south, west, north. In the chapters that follow each of which is dedicated to one of the four, Brotton has opted for a different system, he follows the sun. Starting in the east, passing through the zenith at middy defining the south-north line and then setting in the west. 

Each of the chapters is filled with a myriad of the uses of the cardinal direction term featured in numerous different cultures, languages, eras, showing the wide variations that the specific contexts give to the term. In the East chapter, for example, he looks at the history of the European perception of the East, the Orient. Each of the terms taken under the magnifying  glass can have both positive and negative connotations. In English, for example, the South can stand for the so-called global south a perceived collection of poor, underdeveloped countries but of the other side it can stand for warm sunlit beaches and palm trees in desirable holiday resorts. A detailed analysis of all the examples Brotton elucidates would make this review as long if not longer than his book. 

However, I will expend a few words on the final chapter on the West. Through out antiquity and much of western or European history, the west had strong negative connotations. It’s where the sun went to die every day so, it became associated with death and decay. This began to change when the Europeans first stumbled upon the Americas. Suddenly the west was a new world a world of possibilities and chances epitomised in the North American slogan “Go West young man!”

Having opened his book with the NASA’s Blue Marble his final chapter is named The Blue Dot, but it is not named after that other iconic image of the Earth from space. Brotton opens with some personal remarks on living in East Berlin and the collapse of the Wall in 1989, living as a northerner in Southern England, and living in South Africa before moving on to the introduction of digital maps and Apples introduction of a blue dot on their maps in the iPhone to show viewers how to get from here to there. This serves as an introduction to a discussion as to whether the reliance on digital maps on computing devices will cause people to lose their sense of place.  

There are a total of twenty-three very good colour illustrations placed together in the centre of the book. However, an art director thought that it would be cool to reproduce these on glossy, deep black pages, which I personally found anything but attractive. I suppose it’s a matter of taste!

Brotton’s book has extensive endnotes for each chapter giving the sources for the information contained in the chapter. There is, however, no separate bibliography listing those sources. The book concludes with an extensive index. 

Brotton has obviously invested an awful lot of work over the years reading and cataloguing all of the widespread references to the four terms that form the subject of his book and which he has here presented in a continuous narrative. He writes well and have a very accessible style and I found it both fascinating and entertaining to read the efforts of his endeavours. However, in the end I couldn’t help asking myself what the actual purpose of the whole enterprise is and who is this book even aimed at. I enjoyed reading it but have no idea who I would recommend it to. 

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^[1] Jerry Brotton, Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction, Allen Lane, 2024.