Excerpt:
This major British Library exhibition traced the West's response to the oldest intellectual challenge facing the human mind: what is the shape and the extent of the earth and of the cosmos which contains it? The problem has been the province of religion, poetry and myth, but in the western scientific tradition it resolved itself into the twin enterprises of mapping the earth and the heavens. The exhibition of more than one hundred maps, books and artefacts, drew on a thousand years of science and art. It showed the progress of scientific knowledge of the earth and the heavens, and also the ways in which art and symbolism have been used to make statements about man's relationship to his world and the mysteries of the universe.