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Assessed as a series of narrative geographical constructs, isolarii reflect the diverse political and strategic agenda of the societies that produced and made use of them. Considering the geographical range covered by each isolario, their successive structure and contents, the article attempts to evaluate them as eclectic maritime cosmographies that sustained and supported the various workings of Western European overseas expansion from the early fifteenth century to the early seventeenth. The isolario is a cartographic encyclopaedia of islands, a particular genre that flourished during the Renaissance exploration of the maritime horizons. The isolario is a maritime cosmography, an erudite effort to chart the seas through the detailed cartographic presentation of sole fixed positions in the maritime flux: the islands. As a cultural construct, the isolario reflects the challenges of early modern cosmography, due to European expansion towards the east and west and the resulting altered perception of the world.1 It processes and promotes an alternative spatial system, varied and fragmentary, situated after the familiar continental frontiers. The isolario could be considered as a Humanistic project, an early modern echo of the ancient insular peregrinations narrated by Homer, Virgil and Apollodorus. It constitutes yet another combination of learned approach and empirical inspection. In fact, the isolario reflects a meeting among the various forces of rising modernity: the notions of connectivity imposed by merchants and navigators on the scattered image of the world; the political and economic prospects of maritime expansion; the development of long-distance communication networks; Humanism’s curiosity about geography, natural history and ethnography; the growing faith of the learned in tested and positive information; and the urge to provide administrators and men of action with useful, practical tools. The isolario is an artefact of early modern geographical culture, a Renaissance project that did not survive into the Age of Enlightenment, nor was it transmuted into another descriptive and cartographic geographical 1 See Frank Lestringant, “Le monde ouvert”, in Gérald Chaix (ed.), L’Europe de la Renaissance, 1470-1560, Nantes: Éditions du Temps, 2002, pp. 9-26 (especially pp. 18-19). The Historical Review / La Revue Historique Department of Neohellenic Research / Institute of Historical Research Volume IX (2012)

The Politics of the Isolario: Maritime Cosmography and Overseas Expansion During the Renaissance