Abstract

This chapter explores how Ptolemy's Geography and medieval Jewish exegesis helped reshape sixteenth-century European views on water and the relationship between the world's landmasses and waterways. Whereas Ptolemy's Geography argued that there was more land and less water in the world than medieval Europeans typically thought, medieval Jewish scholars explained the dry land's existence through God's more direct intervention into the world than their medieval Christian contemporaries. It argues that the method through which sixteenth-century European scholars studied the world in which they lived meant that the books they read shaped the ways in which they conceptualized the arrangement of the world's landmasses and bodies of water, and the ontological status of that relationship.

Keywords: Ptolemy's Geography; Jewish exegesis; humanism; Nicholas of Lyra; Biblia Rabbinica; Christian Hebraism

Previously there were more troubles, since it was disputed whether the heaven had a spherical shape, as there were those who asserted that the earth's orb swims in the Ocean, just as a ball swims in water, thus: with its top sticking out to such an extent and with all the rest being covered by water; and in many other things they likewise have erred, who spread this art (artem) in writing. Now, since by many others, especially by Ptolemy, the thread is stretched out by whose lead anyone is easily able to free themselves from this labyrinth, the way is laid out through which you come quickly to the summit of this art without losses – a way that they ignore, to whom it is proper to ramble frequently in the explication of good authors.