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 and of the nature of geography itself.

"In its ambitious scope and humanistic approach, the book is an excellent example of the erudite scholarship that traces the emergence and mutability of an earthly imagination manifest in changing cartographic practices over time. . . . There is, for example, a brilliant exposé of how, in Renaissance Europe, the dissection of the mantle by mapmakers echoed the contemporaneous slicing open and pinning back of the tissues of the human body in anatomical science. . . . As an account of ideas and artifacts The Mantle of the Earth provides a sweeping backdrop to current-day scientific technologies and practices." - Science

"della Dora unfolds a sweeping history of geographical imaginations that shows indelibly how constructions of global space are bound up with the epistemological presumptions and social preoccupations of the periods in which they emerge. The book will be indispensable for cultural historians of cartography and environmental thought as well as rewarding for scholars of the specific cultural contexts that feature in the genealogies. Further,The Mantle of the Earth has resonances beyond scholarship in that it holds out alternative ways of contemplating the earth against a backdrop of global environmental change." - Imago Mundi

"The Earth's mantle constitutes a major concept in modern geosciences.. Veronica Della Dora's book invites us to go beyond our modern definitions of the object to explore the genealogy of the term." - Metascience