More than a survey analysis of French literary contributions to early modern epistemology, Heitsch and Korta's Early Modern Visions of Space: France and Beyond brings a range of critical vocabularies—philological, rhetorical, material, physiological, psychological, theological, cosmological, geographic, cartographic, and architectural, to name the most salient—to its surprisingly broad subject matter. Taking sixteenth-century Paris as one of several focal points, the collected essays dig deeply into the age's varied, evolving conceptualizations of space and spatial orientation: of how one experiences space, lives and works within it, imagines it, and seeks to represent it.

The book's subtitle, France and Beyond, points to the expansiveness of this literature, which reaches westward to the New World, upward to the heavens (both Christian and Neoplatonic), downward to the subterranean depths below Paris, inward to the private worlds of individual conscience, and outward to the imaginative, possible worlds of the early novel. At the intellectual core of this collection is the complex philosophical question: How do we perceive/imagine/construct ourselves and/in our world/s? The essays’ varied answers are illuminating, generative, and often relevant to our own lifeworld today, given the damage our species has done in exploring, measuring, carving up, and subduing the planet. The following cannot do justice to so wide-ranging a collection, though it gives essay titles and an overview of subjects.

The book divides into five sections, each of three chapters. The first section, “Space and Territory: Geographies in Texts,” highlights essays by David LaGuardia, Phillip John Usher, and Jeremie C. Korta. As Heitsch and Korta write in their introduction, these feature “the early modern exploration and codification of urban and rural spaces as well as maritime and industrial expanses” (18). Featuring essays by Robert J. Hudson, Scott Francis, and Elizabeth Black, the second section, “Space and Politics: Literary Geographies,” explores “how built forms as architectural or literary constructions and spatial orientations are intertwined.” Presenting essays by Kathleen Long, Emily Cranford, and Reineir Leushius, the third section, “Space and Gender: Geopolitical Approaches,” charts “the experience of gender as political, territorial, and communicative exploration.”

Featuring essays by Eric MacPhail, Brendan Rowley, and Dorothea Heitsch, the fourth section, “Space and Ethics: Geocritical Ventures,” treats “early modern globalism where locals, explorers, immigrants, adventurers, and intellectuals remake themselves in new places, engage in or meet with resistance, or attempt to rework local sociopolitical systems while reassessing those they are familiar with.” Presenting essays by Ji Gao, Hassan Melehy, and Katie Chenoweth, the fifth section, “The Space of the Book, the book as Space: Printing, Reading, Publishing,” analyzes “the tactile object of the book as an arena for commerce, politics, and authorial experimentation” (19). The collection ends strongly with Philippe Dean's “Locus Narrandi: The Place of Leisure in the Renaissance.” In his wide-ranging survey, Dean shows how “a mapping of the world—and of knowledge—is also a mapping of the body” (Heitsch and Korta, 17): “Both complement each other because the place of the body (or the relative place of one's mind in relation to ‘common’ knowledge) needs to be measured as well as the world itself” (18).

For all its variety in subject matter, the collection coheres through its focus on eyesight, its enablements, and its intellectual products: these include the bodily instrumentation of sight, the materiality (hence, the localizing) of the objects of sight, and our methods of spatial mapping. The territory being mapped in this literature is often imaginary, rendered as a text, iconography, or visual program—from fictive floating islands to the “pretty rooms” of love sonnets. These purely literary containers configure experience in ways analogous to bodily experience of the material world. So, though the book's focus rests in literature rather than in epistemology, what is in fact charted are the intellectual origins of modern philosophy as these come to fruition in the early seventeenth century, with the writings of René Descartes and Francis Bacon.

All well chosen and expertly edited, the essays are finely honed in their methods and vocabularies, providing models for contemporary scholarship. Anyone interested in the historical confluence of literature, material culture, and epistemology will dive into this book.