When paradise was on the map - The Boston Globe

Por um escritor misterioso

Last updated 09 abril 2025

When paradise was on the map - The Boston Globe

The quest to locate paradise began in earnest in the fifth century AD, after St. Augustine made the case for its physical reality. In the centuries that followed, medieval authorities matter-of-factly placed it at the easternmost limits of the world. Alessandro Scafi, a cultural historian based at the Warburg Institute in London, first addressed the subject in the extensive scholarly compendium “Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth” (2006), and has now released “Maps of Paradise” (2013), a sumptuously illustrated volume intended for a wider audience. To follow the movements of Eden, as Scafi does in “Maps of Paradise,” is to take a tour of the limits of the world as Europeans knew it in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance.
The quest to locate paradise began in earnest in the fifth century AD, after St. Augustine made the case for its physical reality. In the centuries that followed, medieval authorities matter-of-factly placed it at the easternmost limits of the world. Alessandro Scafi, a cultural historian based at the Warburg Institute in London, first addressed the subject in the extensive scholarly compendium “Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth” (2006), and has now released “Maps of Paradise” (2013), a sumptuously illustrated volume intended for a wider audience. To follow the movements of Eden, as Scafi does in “Maps of Paradise,” is to take a tour of the limits of the world as Europeans knew it in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance.