Writing Cartography’s Enlightenment

ABSTRACT

The Enlightenment poses a particular problem for map history. The period acquired a special significance as the historical fulcrum in the narrative of the history of cartography. This essay provides an historiographical summary of how the Enlightenment was accorded this significance, how it was called into question with the development of sociocultural approaches to maps and mapping, and how a comprehensive history of mapping in the period 1650–1800 – undertaken as Volume Four of the multi-volume series The History of Cartography – requires a completely restructured approach to map history.

KEYWORDS:

• Map history
• History of Cartography Project
• mapping modes
• science
• art
• European Enlightenment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on the contributors

Matthew H. Edney is Osher Professor in the History of Cartography, University of Southern Maine, and director of the History of Cartography Project, University of Wisconsin–Madison. His most recent books are Cartography: The Ideal and its History (2019) and, as co-editor with Mary Sponberg Pedley, Cartography in the European Enlightenment, Volume Four of The History of Cartography (2019).

Mary Sponberg Pedley is co-editor with Matthew Edney of Cartography in the European Enlightenment, Volume Four of The History of Cartography (2019). She is Adjunct Assistant Curator of maps at the William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, and Associate Editor of Imago Mundi.

Notes

1 Note that Juan de la Cosa had also accompanied Columbus on the first voyage of 1492–1493, as part-owner and master of the Santa María, Columbus’s flagship. The other maps to which Humboldt referred are Diogo Ribeiro’s two planispheres in the Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek, Weimar: Kt 020-57S, from 1527; and Kt 020-58S, from 1529; see Fernández-Armesto (2007: Figures 30.28 and 30.30).

2 The three bound portions of Volume Two are technically ‘books’ – thus Volume Two, Book One, and so on – because they were separately published and have separate paginations. However, the two bound portions of each of Volumes Three through Six are properly called ‘parts’ because each volume was published as a single unit with continuous pagination. This difference makes citing the series as a whole rather difficult, as the usual locution, ‘6 volumes in 12 books’ is incorrect. The proper form for citing the whole series is as ‘6 volumes in 8 books’.

3 The press of other commitments required Burnett to give up his editorial role in late 2004.