This is a detailed history of the paired development of geography and cartography through the middle ages, the Renaissance rediscovery of classical texts, the so-called "Age of Discovery," and the early 16th century. I bookmarked too many pages containing interesting facts and insights to be able to share them.

The conventional wisdom about what Europeans did and didn't know about the earth is picked apart here. As with so many issues of the early modern era, we see a bizarre juxtaposition of the modern and reasonable ("the earth must be round because the lookout spots land before a man on deck") and the completely mythical (Europeans' unquashable belief in Prester John). Paired with their ignorance of North and South America and the East was their total certainty about the existence of a literal and historical Heavenly Paradise in the Far East, Hy-Brasil, and other significant geographical features that only ever existed as rumors. And to top off their outlandish ideas about the world outside Europe, medieval Europeans also lacked the technology to explore and believed that staying home and ratiocinating over the Bible was an adequate way to deduce the shape of the earth. The book shows how their fuzzy and fanciful mental map of the world was overturned through technology and thinking through the ramifications of Europeans' voyages of exploration, to emerge in the 16th century as something we can recognize as a correct world map.

The book is ostensibly about a single map, but I wouldn't call it a microhistory in the sense of tracing something small through a large expanse of space or time. Instead, it's more a straight-up history of the development of an idea during a particular era. I would note, though, that it doesn't make a very good ebook due to the important illustrations.