Chorography

Renaissance revival

Ptolemy's text was rediscovered in the West at the beginning of the fifteenth century, and the term "chorography" was revived by humanist scholars. John Dee in 1570 regarded the practice as "an underling, and a twig of Geographie", by which the "plat" [plan or drawing] of a particular place would be exhibited to the eye.

The term also came to be used, however, for written descriptions of regions. These regions were extensively visited by the writer, who then combined local topographical description, summaries of the historical sources, and local knowledge and stories, into a text. The most influential example (at least in Britain) was probably William Camden's Britannia (first edition 1586), which described itself on its title page as a Chorographica descriptio. William Harrison in 1587 similarly described his own "Description of Britaine" as an exercise in chorography, distinguishing it from the historical/chronological text of Holinshed's Chronicles (to which the "Description" formed an introductory section). Peter Heylin in 1652 defined chorography as "the exact description of some Kingdom, Countrey, or particular Province of the same", and gave as examples Pausanias's Description of Greece (2nd century AD); Camden's Britannia (1586); Lodovico Guicciardini's Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi (1567) (on the Low Countries); and Leandro Alberti's Descrizione d'Italia (1550).

Camden's Britannia was predominantly concerned with the history and antiquities of Britain, and, probably as a result, the term chorography in English came to be particularly associated with antiquarian texts. William Lambarde, John Stow, John Hooker, Michael Drayton, Tristram Risdon, John Aubrey and many others used it in this way, arising from a gentlemanly topophilia and a sense of service to one's county or city, until it was eventually often applied to the genre of county history. A late example was William Grey's Chorographia (1649), a survey of the antiquities of the city of Newcastle upon Tyne. Even before Camden's work appeared, Andrew Melville in 1574 had referred to chorography and chronology as the "twa lights" [two lights] of history.

The following two examples of chorography are excerpts from Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca's book, Castaways:

The land is level for the most part, from the place where we disembarked to this town and land of Apalachee; the ground is sand and also loam, everywhere there are large trees and clearings in which there are walnut trees and bay trees and others of the kind called gum trees...

[The people of the nation] wore their hair loose and very long and were covered in cloaks made of sable skins...

However, the term also continued to be used for maps and map-making, particularly of sub-national or county areas. William Camden praised the county mapmakers Christopher Saxton and John Norden as "most skilfull (sic) Chorographers"; and Robert Plot in 1677 and Christopher Packe in 1743 both referred to their county maps as chorographies.

By the beginning of the eighteenth century the term had largely fallen out of use in all these contexts, being superseded for most purposes by either "topography" or "cartography". Samuel Johnson in his Dictionary (1755) made a distinction between geography, chorography and topography, arguing that geography dealt with large areas, topography with small areas, but chorography with intermediary areas, being "less in its object than geography, and greater than topography". In practice, however, the term is only rarely found in English by this date.

Modern usages

In more technical geographical literature, the term had been abandoned as city views and city maps became more and more sophisticated and demanded a set of skills that required not only skilled draftsmanship but also some knowledge of scientific surveying. However, its use was revived for a second time in the late nineteenth century by the geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen. He regarded chorography as a specialization within geography, comprising the description through field observation of the particular traits of a given area.

The term is also now widely used by historians and literary scholars to refer to the early modern genre of topographical and antiquarian literature.