The term mantle has inspired philosophers, geographers, and theologians and shaped artists’ and mapmakers’ visual vocabularies for thousands of years. According to Veronica della Dora, mantle is the “metaphor par excellence, for it unfolds between the seen and the unseen as a threshold and as a point of tension.” Featuring numerous illustrations, The Mantle of the Earth: Genealogies of a Geographical Metaphor is an intellectual history of the term mantle and its metaphorical representation in art and literature, geography and cartography. Through the history of this metaphor from antiquity to the modern day, we learn about shifting perceptions and representations of global space, about our planetary condition, and about the nature of geography itself.

Veronica della Dora is professor of human geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, and a fellow of the British Academy. She is the author of Imagining Mount Athos: Visions of a Holy Place from Homer to World War II; Landscape, Nature, and the Sacred in Byzantium; and Mountain: Nature and Culture.