Maps and Travel in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period

Maps and Travel in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period PDF

Author: Ingrid Baumgärtner

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2019-03-04

Total Pages: 421

ISBN-13: 3110588773

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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.

Mapping Narrations – Narrating Maps

Mapping Narrations – Narrating Maps PDF

Author: Ingrid Baumgärtner

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2022-06-06

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 1501516019

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This volume offers the author’s central articles on the medieval and early modern history of cartography for the first time in English translation. A first group of essays gives an overview of medieval cartography and illustrates the methods of cartographers. Another analyzes world maps and travel accounts in relation to mapped spaces. A third examines land surveying, cartographical practices of exploration, and the production of Portolan atlases.

Mapping Narrations - Narrating Maps

Mapping Narrations - Narrating Maps PDF

Author: Ingrid Baumgärtner

Publisher:

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13:

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This volume offers the author's central articles on the medieval and early modern history of cartography for the first time in English translation. A first group of essays gives an overview of medieval cartography, illustrating the methods of cartographers. Another analyzes world maps and travel accounts in relation to mapped spaces. A third examines land surveying, cartographical practices of exploration, and the production of Portolan atlases.

Imagination and Fantasy in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time

Imagination and Fantasy in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time PDF

Author: Albrecht Classen

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2020-08-24

Total Pages: 820

ISBN-13: 3110693666

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The notions of other peoples, cultures, and natural conditions have always been determined by the epistemology of imagination and fantasy, providing much freedom and creativity, and yet have also created much fear, anxiety, and horror. In this regard, the pre-modern world demonstrates striking parallels with our own insofar as the projections of alterity might be different by degrees, but they are fundamentally the same by content. Dreams, illusions, projections, concepts, hopes, utopias/dystopias, desires, and emotional attachments are as specific and impactful as the physical environment. This volume thus sheds important light on the various lenses used by people in the Middle Ages and the early modern age as to how they came to terms with their perceptions, images, and notions. Previous scholarship focused heavily on the history of mentality and history of emotions, whereas here the history of pre-modern imagination, and fantasy assumes center position. Imaginary things are taken seriously because medieval and early modern writers and artists clearly reveal their great significance in their works and their daily lives. This approach facilitates a new deep-structure analysis of pre-modern culture.

Latin Literatures of Medieval and Early Modern Times in Europe and Beyond

Latin Literatures of Medieval and Early Modern Times in Europe and Beyond PDF

Author: Francesco Stella

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2024-07-15

Total Pages: 726

ISBN-13: 9027247293

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The textual heritage of Medieval Latin is one of the greatest reservoirs of human culture. Repertories list more than 16,000 authors from about 20 modern countries. Until now, there has been no introduction to this world in its full geographical extension. Forty contributors fill this gap by adopting a new perspective, making available to specialists (but also to the interested public) new materials and insights. The project presents an overview of Medieval (and post-medieval) Latin Literatures as a global phenomenon including both Europe and extra-European regions. It serves as an introduction to medieval Latin's complex and multi-layered culture, whose attraction has been underestimated until now. Traditional overviews mostly flatten specificities, yet in many countries medieval Latin literature is still studied with reference to the local history. Thus the first section presents 20 regional surveys, including chapters on authors and works of Latin Literature in Eastern, Central and Northern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas. Subsequent chapters highlight shared patterns of circulation, adaptation, and exchange, and underline the appeal of medieval intermediality, as evidenced in manuscripts, maps, scientific treatises and iconotexts, and its performativity in narrations, theatre, sermons and music. The last section deals with literary “interfaces,” that is motifs or characters that exemplify the double-sided or the long-term transformations of medieval Latin mythologemes in vernacular culture, both early modern and modern, such as the legends about King Arthur, Faust, and Hamlet.

The World Map, 1300–1492

The World Map, 1300–1492 PDF

Author: Evelyn Edson

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2007-07-15

Total Pages: 446

ISBN-13: 1421404303

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A history of the development of world maps during the later medieval period in the centuries leading up to Columbus’s journey. In the two centuries before Columbus, mapmaking was transformed. The World Map, 1300–1492 investigates this important, transitional period of mapmaking. Beginning with a 1436 atlas of ten maps produced by Venetian Andrea Bianco, Evelyn Edson uses maps of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to examine how the discoveries of missionaries and merchants affected the content and configuration of world maps. She finds that both the makers and users of maps struggled with changes brought about by technological innovation?the compass, quadrant, and astrolabe?rediscovery of classical mapmaking approaches, and increased travel. To reconcile the tensions between the conservative and progressive worldviews, mapmakers used a careful blend of the old and the new to depict a world that was changing?and growing?before their eyes. This engaging and informative study reveals how the ingenuity, creativity, and adaptability of these craftsmen helped pave the way for an age of discovery. “A comprehensive and complex picture of the changing face of medieval geography. With the mastery of a formidable palette of historiographic knowledge and well-reasoned discussions of the sources, The World Map, 1300–1492 will certainly remain an important work to consult for both medieval and early modern scholars for many years to come.” —Ian J. Aebel, Terrae Incognitae

Making Contact

Making Contact PDF

Author: Glenn Burger

Publisher: University of Alberta

Published: 2003-02-26

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780888643773

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When civilizations first encounter each other a cascade of change is triggered that both challenges and reinforces the identities of all parties. Making Contact revisits key encounters between cultures in the medieval and early modern world. Contributors cross disciplinary boundaries to explore the implications of contact. Scott D. Westrem examines the imagined Africa depicted in the Bell Mappamundi. Day-to-day accommodations between the religious identities of Vilnius, in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, are explored by David Frick. Steven F. Kruger argues that medieval Christian identity was destabilized by the living Talmudic tradition. Individual Jesuits who were critical to the success of contact in Japan are evaluated by Nakai Ayako. Linda Woodbridge argues that Elizabethan attitudes towards aboriginals paralleled their attitudes towards English vagrants. Despite a nod to Arcadian conventions, travel narratives of Virginia were preoccupied with finding wealth, according to Paul W. DePasquale’s research. Rick H. Lee examines the conflicting loyalties of Pierre Raddisson in the New World. Richard A. Young demonstrates that the Florida shipwreck narratives of Cabeza de Vaca were groomed for intended audiences, past and present. This rich interdisciplinary collaboration contributes to the debate on boundaries between disciplines, as well as boundaries between the Middle Ages and the early modern period, and also between historical and theoretical perspectives. Making Contact draws our attention to the important ways in which historic encounters with contrasting ‘others’ have shaped the identities of both individual and corporate ‘selves’ over a span of five centuries.

Mapping Time and Space

Mapping Time and Space PDF

Author: Evelyn Edson

Publisher:

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13:

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Medieval world maps are often seen today as quaint and amusing artefacts that are hopelessly wrong. Evelyn Edson demonstrates that the medieval world view, as expressed in maps, was not simply a matter of physical measurements, but of placing the earth in a philosophical and religious context. Hence many medieval maps show the passage of time and a narrative of human spiritual development including creation, the coming of Christ, and the Last Judgement. Professor Edson makes clear that modern assumptions concerning maps are of little value, and one cannot assume that the maps were used for the same purpose or had the same meaning as they have today. In fact the differences in structure and content can give us an intriguing view of how medieval makers and readers saw their world. A wide range of manuscripts are surveyed including works of history (both 'universal histories' and more locally-focused chronicles), Easter and calendar manuscripts, individual maps including such famous wall maps asthe Ebstorf Map and the Hereford Mappa Mundi, and lastly maps which were designed to illustrate religious visions.

Tracing the Trails in the Medieval World

Tracing the Trails in the Medieval World PDF

Author: Albrecht Classen

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-10-11

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 1000205029

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Every human being knows that we are walking through life following trails, whether we are aware of them or not. Medieval poets, from the anonymous composer of Beowulf to Marie de France, Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Strassburg, and Guillaume de Lorris to Petrarch and Heinrich Kaufringer, predicated their works on the notion of the trail and elaborated on its epistemological function. We can grasp here an essential concept that determines much of medieval and early modern European literature and philosophy, addressing the direction which all protagonists pursue, as powerfully illustrated also by the anonymous poets of Herzog Ernst and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Dante’s Divina Commedia, in fact, proves to be one of the most explicit poetic manifestations of the fundamental idea of the trail, but we find strong parallels also in powerful contemporary works such as Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de la vie humaine and in many mystical tracts.