The Mantle of the Earth

In its ambitious scope and humanistic approach, the book is an excellent example of the erudite scholarship that traces the emergence and mutability of an earthly imagination manifest in changing cartographic practices over time. . . . There is, for example, a brilliant expose of how, in Renaissance Europe, the dissection of the mantle by mapmakers echoed the contemporaneous slicing open and pinning back of the tissues of the human body in anatomical science. . . . As an account of ideas and artifacts The Mantle of the Earth provides a sweeping backdrop to current-day scientific technologies and practices. -- Deborah P. Dixon * Science * Although appropriated by geophysics the Mantle of the Earth has a much longer history magnificently narrated by della Dora. She gives to the critical zones a much richer mythical dimension combining metaphors of weaving and unveiling all the way to Gaia. A masterpiece. -- Bruno Latour della Dora unfolds a sweeping history of geographical imaginations that shows indelibly how constructions of global space are bound up with the epistemological presumptions and social preoccupations of the periods in which they emerge. The book will be indispensable for cultural historians of cartography and environmental thought as well as rewarding for scholars of the specific cultural contexts that feature in the genealogies. Further,The Mantle of the Earth has resonances beyond scholarship in that it holds out alternative ways of contemplating the earth against a backdrop of global environmental change. * Imago Mundi * The Earth's mantle constitutes a major concept in modern geosciences.. Veronica Della Dora's book invites us to go beyond our modern definitions of the object to explore the genealogy of the term. * Metascience * Probing the constellation of meanings that the earth's mantle has thrown up in European and North American history from antiquity to the present day, della Dora offers nothing less than a genealogy of our attitudes to the earth and its environments. Polyglot, profound, and at times poetic, The Mantle of the Earth is an astonishing intellectual history with vital resonances to our present planetary condition. -- Robert J. Mayhew, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol The Mantle of the Earth is an exceptional book. Thoroughly researched, endlessly interesting, and beautifully written, it takes a notion that seems straightforward and explores it in multiple insightful and productive ways. Its breadth is quite extraordinary. Della Dora also wears her learning lightly, until you start looking at the notes, which are staggeringly erudite. Fabulous. -- Stuart Elden, University of Warwick, author of The Birth of Territory, Shakespearean Territories, and Canguilhem An ambitious, wide-ranging, and detailed inquiry into a compellingly evident (yet underexamined) topic, namely, the metaphor of the earth's mantle (or veil) and the intellectual genealogy and representational geography of this term. Notions of fabrication-in weaving; in the textures of surfaces; and in maps, as veils and as substantive forms of earthly representation-are employed with ease and insight. Clear, with hardly a word of jargon and numerous well-chosen illustrations that help illuminate the text, The Mantle of the Earth is impressive in its scholarly depth and range. -- Charles W. J. Withers, Geographer Royal for Scotland, professor emeritus, University of Edinburg