The Fourth Part of the World - Tapa blanda

Maps are projections not only of physical landscapes but also of the beliefs and mental perspectives of
their age. The Waldseemuller map, drawn in 1507 and lost until 1901, was the first map to synthesize the
learning of the ancients and the discoveries of the moderns and to bring them together in a dramatically new
picture of the whole world. The map broke the New World also known as the fourth part of the world
after parts one, two and three: Asia, Europe, and Africa free from its presumed connection to Asia and
introduced Europe to America. It was the ur-document of modern world cartography, in other words,
presenting for the first time a vision of the whole world that corresponds roughly to the one we know today.
The Fourth Part of the World will trace the convergence of ideas, discoveries, and social forces that
made the Waldseemuller map possible. A series of overlapping voyages, some geographical and some
intellectual, some famous and some forgotten make up the remarkable story of the way in which medieval Europeans gradually began to imagine, to explore, and to map the world beyond their immediate horizons.
For too long the map has been celebrated only as the map that gave America its name, when in fact it s
something far more complex, revealing, ultimately, important. To examine this map up close is to discover a
dizzyingly rich picture of both geography and history. The line between these was once much blurrier than it
is today. Medieval cartographers in Europe sometimes called their world maps histories, and medieval
chroniclers sometimes called their world histories maps. This map, in particular has a wealth of stories to
tell but only if you know how to find them.
The Waldseemuller map appeared on the scene during the Renaissance, a time of convulsive social and
intellectual change, when Europeans were famously rethinking their place in the world and the cosmos. So it
offers an unusual but surprisingly effective way of peering into this world of flux. It is a kind of historical
CAT scan: a remarkable single image, packed full of information and personality and mystery, that not only
introduced the New World to Europe but also captured a watershed moment in Western history, when a new
worldview was literally coming into being. And that worldview, of course, is our own.

Toby Lester is a contributing editor to and has written for The Atlantic on subjects that include the sociology
of new religions, the attempt to reconstruct ancient Greek music, the struggle to change alphabets in
Azerbaijan, and the chance harmonies of everyday sounds. His work has also been featured on the radio
show This American Life. This is his first book.