The volume discusses the world as it was known in the Medieval and Early Modern periods, focusing on projects concerned with mapping as a conceptual and artistic practice, with visual representations of space, and with destinations of real and fictive travel. Maps were often taken as straightforward, objective configurations. However, they expose deeply subjective frameworks with social, political, and economic significance. Travel narratives, whether illustrated or not, can address similar frameworks. Whereas travelled space is often adventurous, and speaking of hardship, strange encounters and danger, city portraits tell a tale of civilized life and civic pride. The book seeks to address the multiple ways in which maps and travel literature conceive of the world, communicate a 'Weltbild', depict space, and/or define knowledge. The volume challenges academic boundaries in the study of cartography by exploring the links between mapmaking and artistic practices. The contributions discuss individual mapmakers, authors of travelogues, mapmaking as an artistic practice, the relationship between travel literature and mapmaking, illustration in travel literature, and imagination in depictions of newly explored worlds.

Annotation This is a book about "geographical imagination" through the prism of maps, travel accounts, fiction, and other cultural works that helped fashion understandings of space and place in early modern Japan.

At the turn of the fifteenth century, Rome was a city in transitionparts ancient, medieval, and modern; pagan and Christianand as it emerged from its medieval decline through the return of papal power and the onset of the Renaissance, its portrayals in print transformed as well. Jessica Maier s book explores the history of the Roman city portrait genre during the rise of Renaissance print culture. She illustrates how the maps of this era helped to promote the city, to educate, and to facilitate armchair exploration and what they reveal about how the people of Rome viewed or otherwise imagined their city. She also advances our understanding of early modern cartography, which embodies a delicate, intentional balance between science and art. The text is beautifully illustrated with nearly 100 images of the genre, a dozen of them in color."

An exploration of the ways early modern European artists have visualized continents through the female (sometimes male) body to express their perceptions of newly encountered peoples. Often stereotypical, these personifications are however more complex than what they seem.

In this generously illustrated book, Jerry Brotton documents the dramatic changes in the nature of geographical representation which took place during the sixteenth century, explaining how much they convey about the transformation of European culture at the end of the early modern era. He examines the age's fascination with maps, charts, and globes as both texts and artifacts that provided their owners with a promise of gain, be it intellectual, political, or financial. From the Middle Ages through most of the sixteenth century, Brotton argues, mapmakers deliberately exploited the partial, often conflicting accounts of geographically distant territories to create imaginary worlds. As long as the lands remained inaccessible, these maps and globes were politically compelling. They bolstered the authority of the imperial patrons who employed the geographers and integrated their creations into ever more grandiose rhetorics of expansion. As the century progressed, however, geographers increasingly owed allegiance to the administrators of vast joint-stock companies that sought to exploit faraway lands and required the systematic mapping of commercially strategic territories. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, maps had begun to serve instead as scientific guides, defining objectively valid images of the world.

Renaissance map-makers produced ever more accurate descriptions of geography, which were also beautiful works of art. They filled the oceans Europeans were exploring with ships and to describe the real ships which were the newest and best products of technology. Above all the ships were there to show the European conquest of the seas of the world.

This fascinating volume brings together leading specialists, whohave analyzed the thoughts and records documenting the worldviewsof a wide range of pre-modern societies. Presents evidence from across the ages; from antiquity throughto the Age of Discovery Provides cross-cultural comparison of ancient societies aroundthe globe, from the Chinese to the Incas and Aztecs, from theGreeks and Romans to the peoples of ancient India Explores newly discovered medieval Islamic materials

These diverse essays investigate political factors behind the rapid development of cartography in Renaissance Europe and its impact on emerging European nations. By 1500 a few rulers had already discovered that better knowledge of their lands would strengthen their control over them; by 1550, the cartographer's art had become an important instrument for bringing territories under the control of centralized government. Throughout the following century increasing governmental reliance on maps demanded greater accuracy and more sophisticated techniques. This volume, a detailed survey of the political uses of cartography between 1400 and 1700 in Europe, answers these questions: When did monarchs and ministers begin to perceive that maps could be useful in government? For what purposes were maps commissioned? How accurate and useful were they? How did cartographic knowledge strengthen the hand of government? By focusing on particular places and periods in early modern Europe, the chapters offer new insights into the growth of cartography as a science, the impetus behind these developments - often rulers attempting to expand their power - and the role of mapmaking in European history. The essay on Poland reveals that cartographic progress came only under the impetus of powerful rulers; another explores the French monarchy's role in the burst of scientific cartography that marked the opening of the "splendid century". Additional chapters discuss the profound influence of cartographic ideas on the English aristocracy during the sixteenth century, the relation of progress in mapmaking to imperialistic goals of the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs, and the supposed primacy of Italian mapmakingfollowing the Renaissance. Contributors to this volume are Peter Barber, David Buisseret, John Marino, Michael J. Mikos, Geoffrey Parker, and James Vann. These essays were originally presented as the Kenneth Nebenzahl, Jr., Lectures in the History of Cartography at the Newberry Library.

Ancient Perspectives encompasses a vast arc of space and time—Western Asia to North Africa and Europe from the third millennium BCE to the fifth century CE—to explore mapmaking and worldviews in the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. In each society, maps served as critical economic, political, and personal tools, but there was little consistency in how and why they were made. Much like today, maps in antiquity meant very different things to different people. Ancient Perspectives presents an ambitious, fresh overview of cartography and its uses. The seven chapters range from broad-based analyses of mapping in Mesopotamia and Egypt to a close focus on Ptolemy’s ideas for drawing a world map based on the theories of his Greek predecessors at Alexandria. The remarkable accuracy of Mesopotamian city-plans is revealed, as is the creation of maps by Romans to support the proud claim that their emperor’s rule was global in its reach. By probing the instruments and techniques of both Greek and Roman surveyors, one chapter seeks to uncover how their extraordinary planning of roads, aqueducts, and tunnels was achieved. Even though none of these civilizations devised the means to measure time or distance with precision, they still conceptualized their surroundings, natural and man-made, near and far, and felt the urge to record them by inventive means that this absorbing volume reinterprets and compares.