In The Spatial Reformation, Michael J. Sauter offers a sweeping
history of the way Europeans conceived of three-dimensional space,
including the relationship between Earth and the heavens, between 1350
and 1850. He argues that this "spatial reformation" provoked a
reorganization of knowledge in the West that was arguably as important
as the religious Reformation. Notably, it had its own sacred text, which
proved as central and was as ubiquitously embraced: Euclid's Elements.
Aside from the Bible, no other work was so frequently reproduced in the
early modern era. According to Sauter, its penetration and suffusion
throughout European thought and experience call for a deliberate
reconsideration not only of what constitutes the intellectual foundation
of the early modern era but also of its temporal range.
The Spatial Reformation contends that space is a human construct: that
is, it is a concept that arises from the human imagination and gets
expressed physically in texts and material objects. Sauter begins his
examination by demonstrating how Euclidean geometry, when it was applied
fully to the cosmos, estranged God from man, enabling the breakthrough
to heliocentrism and, by extension, the discovery of the New World.
Subsequent chapters provide detailed analyses of the construction of
celestial and terrestrial globes, Albrecht Dürer's engraving
Melencolia, the secularization of the natural history of the earth and
man, and Hobbes's rejection of Euclid's sense of space and its effect on
his political theory. Sauter's exploration culminates in the formation
of a new anthropology in the eighteenth century that situated humanity
in reference to spaces and places that human eyes had not actually seen.
The Spatial Reformation illustrates how these disparate advancements
can be viewed as resulting expressly from early modernity's embrace of
Euclidean geometry.
