ABSTRACT
The development of modern thought in connection with colonization has been a recurrent theme in these introductions, and this connection is particularly evident in the emergence of modern science. If by science one generally understands not only a kind of knowledge but also a way of knowing, both parts of this definition changed fundamentally over the course of the period surveyed in this volume. This change is evident, for instance, in the transformation, over the course of the sixteenth century, in the character of maps. In the fifteenth century, at the start of the age of colonization, a map was not necessarily an accurate rendition of geographical fact. A mappa-mundi, or world map, offered an understanding of geography, rather than its exact representation. Theory took precedence over observation. For example, should observation of an area of the globe yield a proportion of land to water that contradicted a cartographer’s idea of the world, he might well sketch in an island he thought must exist although no one had actually seen it. For this medieval map-maker, knowledge was a matter of concepts more than of facts. Of course, he did not invent the outlines of the continents or the directions of rivers; he strove to represent the landscape as accurately as he knew it. But accuracy was not as important to him as what he thought of as truth, which descended from geographical and cosmic laws that prevailed no matter what he observed with his limited powers of sight and measurement.
