Book chapter on metaphors of geography in diagramming time

Pickering and Chatto have recently published Knowing Nature in Early Modern Europe, edited by David Beck of Warwick University. They describe the volume:

Today we are used to clear divisions between science and the arts. But early modern thinkers had no such distinctions, with ‘knowledge’ being a truly interdisciplinary pursuit. Each chapter of this collection presents a case study from a different area of knowledge, including the acceptance of heliocentrism and the use of scripture to refute Descartes's claims in A Discourse on Method (1637). The book comes out of an ongoing project, Scientiae, examining the nexus of Renaissance Europe and the history and philosophy of science.

Contents of the book:

Introduction – David Beck 

Part I: Unity and the Investigation of Nature

• ‘Not a Hundred Sorts of Beasts, Not Two Hundred of Birds’: Universal Language and the Early Modern End of the World – James Dougal Fleming
• The Moral Physiology of Laughter – Stephen Pender
• The Part and the Whole: Architectonics of Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century English Thought – Kevin Killeen

Part II: God’s Two Books

• The Use of Scripture in the Beast Machine Controversy – Lloyd Strickland
• Johann Jacob Zimmermann and God’s Two Books: Copernican Cosmology in Lutheran Germany around 1700 – Mike A Zuber
• The Cosmology of Martinus Szent-Ivany SJ (1633–1705): Some Philological Notes on His Dissertatio Cosmographica Seu de Mundi Systemate – Svorad Zavarský

Part III: Imagination and Reality: Time, Zoology and Memory

• May Not Duration Be Represented as Distinctly as Space? Geography and the Visualization of Time in the Early Eighteenth Century – Stephen Boyd Davis
• Early Modern Natural Science as an Agent for Change in Naturalist Painting: Jacopo Ligozzi’s Zoological Illustrations as a Case Study – Angelica Groom
• ‘Direct Ideas’: The Quotidian Imagination in John Willis’s 1618 Memory Theater – Adam Rzepka

My chapter discusses how the mapping of time in the Eighteenth Century was largely modelled on the mapping of space:

The eighteenth century saw the creation of the modern timeline , a diagrammatic representation of historical time that has since become ubiquitous. The present chapter identifies early examples of the genre and discusses their relationship to other forms of knowledge, analysing the artefacts themselves and the contemporary explanations published by their authors. It extends previous work on the influence of mechanical metaphors and models of cognition to focus here on the complementary influence of geography. Geography and chronology were presented as equal contributors to history from at least the sixteenth century, but what was new in the eighteenth was the proposition that chronology could itself become a kind of geography, offering the possibility of ‘cartographies of time.’ The chapter traces the changing relationship between the two disciplines, set in their cultural context.