Anthony Ossa-Richardson & Richard J Oosterhoff: The Cosmography and Geography of Africa

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 17 May 2023

⏱️ 53 minutes

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Summary

In this week's Book Club podcast, we're talking about a very new version of a very old book. Leo Africanus's The Cosmography and Geography of Africa was the first book to introduce Africa to the people of Western Europe. Part Baedeker, part-natural history, part-memoir, part-history book, it dominated the Western understanding of that continent for hundreds of years. Anthony Ossa-Richardson and Richard J Oosterhoff have just published the first new English translation in more than 400 years, and they talk to me about its tangled manuscript history, its mysterious author, and what it gets wrong about giraffes.

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0:00.0	The Spectator's prestigious, economic, Innovator of the Year award in partnership with InvestTech
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0:30.6	Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast.
0:36.4	I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator,
0:38.9	and this week we're talking about a book that's both a new book and a very, very old one.
0:45.4	It's Johannes Leo Africarnus's The Cosmography and Geography of Africa, which is 5 six hundred years old, but is in its first
0:57.0	new translation for 400 years, and I am joined by those translators who are Richard Osterhoff
1:04.4	and Anthony Osser Richardson, Richard, sorry, I hope I've spelled your second, pronounced your
1:09.2	second name correctly. I think that's right. Thank you very much for having us.
1:12.9	Well, many readers, listeners to this podcast may not have heard of the cosmography and geography of Africa,
1:19.5	and they're probably had the same difficulty in pronouncing cosmography as I do.
1:22.8	Can you start by saying, what is this book? What's its significance?
1:27.2	Okay, so this is the first book about Africa
1:30.9	written in a European language, and it's the first book about Africa published in Europe.
1:37.7	There are smaller accounts before it of Christian explorers and soldiers and missionaries who've been to Africa, but they're very
1:45.9	short. This is the first full-scale work about Africa published in a European language for a European
1:51.1	audience. And when it was published in 1550, it was almost immediately a huge sensation
1:58.3	all over Europe. It was translated into many languages. People knew about it
2:02.2	from England to Italy. And for two or three hundred years after publication, it was the main
2:09.8	source of information about Africa until, you know, European explorers started visiting Africa in much more quantities in the 19th century.
	...

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