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Department of History

Term 2 Week 2: Maps and Material Culture

Continuing our focus on various kinds of printed images, this week looks more closely at maps and also at other forms of printed material culture.

Essential Reading

  • Rebecca Carnevali, "Iconographies and material culture of illustrated cheap print from post-Tridentine Bologne", in Massimo Rospocher et al (eds), Crossing Borders, Crossing Cultures: Popular Print in Europe (1450-1900); (De Gruyter, 2019), 33-52.
  • Permission to print Jacopo De Barbari’s view of Venice from Venice: A Documentary History (RP)
  • Jacopo De Barbari's View of Venice (1500)
  • Bronwen Wilson, "Venice, Print and the Early Modern Icon", Urban History 33.1 (2006): 39-64.
  • Extract from Abraham Ortelius’ letter to the reader in the 1570 Latin edition of his atlas. Translated by Marcel Peter René van den Broecke in Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570-1641): Characteristics and development of a sample of on verso map texts (RP)

* Choose one city (besides Venice!) from the Historic Cities website or one of the web resources listed below and consider how it was represented in early printed maps.

Further Reading

  • Juergen Schulz, “Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice Map-Making, City Views, and Moralized Geography,” Art Bulletin 60 (1978): 425-74.
  • Sean Roberts, Printing a Mediterranean world : Florence, Constantinople, and the renaissance of geography (Harvard, 2013).
  • Bronwen Wilson, The world in Venice: print, the city and early modern identity (Toronto, 2005).
  • Dario Del Puppo, "All the World Is a Book: Italian Renaissance Printing in a Global Perspective", Textual Cultures 6/2 (2011): 1-22.
  • Jerry Brotton, "Printing the World," in Marina Frasca-Spada and Nick Jardine (eds), Books and the Sciences in History (Cambridge, 2000), 35-48.
  • Nicholas Warner, The True Description of Cairo: A Sixteenth-Century Venetian View (London, 2006).
  • George McClure, The Culture of Profession in Late Renaissance Italy (Toronto, 2004).
  • Benjamin Arbel, "Maps of the world for ottoman princes? Further evidence and questions concerning the mappamondo of Hajji Ahmed'", Imago Mundi 54 (2002): 19–99.
  • David Woodward, Maps as prints in the Italian Renaissance: makers, distributors and consumers (London, 1996).
  • Robert Mayhew, "Geography, print culture and the Renaissance: "The road less travelled by"," History of European Ideas 27, 4 (2001), 349–369.
  • Michael Wintle, The image of Europe: visualizing Europe in cartography and iconography (New York, 2009).
  • C. Mukerji, 'Printing, cartography and conceptions of place in Renaissance Europe', Media, Culture and Society, 28 (2006): 651-69. 27 (2001): 349-369.
  • Denis Cosgrove, "Mapping new worlds: culture and cartography in sixteenth-century Venice", Imago Mundi 24 (1992): 65-89.
  • Lilian Armstrong, "Benedetto Bordon, "Miniator" and Cartography in Early Sixteenth-Century Venice", Imago Mundi 48 (1996): 65-92.
  • Theodore Cachey Jr., "From the Mediterranean to the World: A Note on the Italian "Book of Islands" (isolario)," California Italian Studies 1(1) (2010): 1-13.
  • Rose Marie San Juan, Rome: A City Out of Print (Minneapolis, 2001).
  • David Buisseret,The mapmaker's quest : depicting new worlds in Renaissance Europe (Oxford, 2003)
  • J.B. Harley, "Silences and Secrecy: The Hidden Agenda of Cartography in Early Modern Europe", Imago Mundi, 40 (1988), 57-76.
  • Jerry Brotton, Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World (London, 1997).
  • I. Manners, "Constructing the Image of a City: The Representation of Constantinople in Christopher Buondelmonti's Liber insularum Archipelagi", Annals of the Association of American Geographers 87 (1997): 72-102.

Web Resources