History of cartography of the Nordic countries III

This special section on the history of cartography of the Nordic countries follows two earlier issues of Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift–Norwegian Journal of Geography on this topic. The first was published in volume 74(4), September 2020, and the second in volume 75(1), March 2021. The present special section contains two articles, one with a broad Nordic focus and the other dealing with Denmark while also making a brief comparison with Sweden.

Arvo Peltonen (2021, this issue) discusses in his article the cartographical image of the European north as represented in Italian map galleries during the late Renaissance. He examines cycles of maps in mural atlases in three galleries dating to the period 1560s – 1580s: the Guardaroba nuova in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence; the Sala del Mappamondo in the Palazzo Farnese, Caprarola; and the Terza loggia in the Palazzo Apostolico Vaticano, Rome. The map cycles reflect how the muralists satisfied their patrons’ objectives of presenting up-to-date geographical information about the relatively little known north European periphery as well as on the region’s mirabilia (wonders, marvels, or curiosities). The galleries demonstrated the artistic and cartographical skills of leading architects, designers, cartographers, and muralists of the time. The galleries also served during the Counter-Reformation as practical and symbolic manifestations of an ideology aiming to reassert and express the supremacy of the ecclesiastical and secular potentates of the European core in Italy. Peltonen’s article demonstrates the influence of the exiled Swedish bishop Olaus Magnus (1490–1557), whose map, the Carta Marina of 1539, and description of the northern peoples (Magnus 1555) provided updated geographical knowledge of the European north and shaped the region’s cartographical image as depicted in the Italian map galleries.

Arvo Peltonen is a geographer with regional and urban planning, and tourism geography as his main research fields. From 1967 to 1996, he was at the University of Helsinki, where he wrote his doctoral thesis on the development of Finnish planning 1815–1970 (Peltonen 1982). From 1996 until his retirement in 2007, he worked at the University of Joensuu, where he was professor and director of the Finnish Network for Tourism Studies. Together with Kerkko Hakulinen, he has co-edited the proceedings of a seminar on the history of cartography and maintenance of cartographical archives (Hakulinen & Peltonen 1981). He has articles published in Finnish on Olaus Magnus and the late Renaissance Italian map galleries (Peltonen 2013; 2015).

Stig Roar Svenningsen and Andreas Aagaard Christensen (2021, this issue) write on the development of cadastral cartography in Denmark and explore the representation of landscape on the enclosure maps of the communities of Brokøb By and Kajemose By in north-western Zealand (Sjælland) from 1807 to 1942. They find that an initial landscape-oriented perspective on landed property changed over time to focus primarily on legal boundaries. Landscape features largely disappeared from cadastral cartography during the 20th century, leaving an ‘empty’ economic space defined by property boundaries. They conclude that this development reflected a changed approach on the part of the land reorganization authorities, whereby economic aspects of the land came to be regarded as separate from its ecological, physical and visual characteristics. Attempts to reintroduce a more landscape-oriented approach in 1929 were unsuccessful; this did not change until the introduction of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in the 1990s. Svenningsen and Christensen contrast the situation in Denmark with that in Sweden, where a holistic representation of the landscape on cadastral maps continued throughout the 19th and 20th century. They discuss how the present cadastral structure of the Danish countryside may act as a hindrance to ecosystem management in the landscape.

Svenningsen and Christensen are both geographers. Stig Roar Svenningsen has worked as a research librarian in the Special Collections Department at the Royal Danish Library, Denmark’s national library in Copenhagen, since 2015 and as senior researcher from 2019. In his doctoral thesis, Svenningsen investigates historical cartography and the use of aerial photographs in geography and landscape research in Denmark (Svenningsen 2015). In related articles, his focus has ranged across Danish historical military cartography (Svenningsen 2014; 2016a), environmental cartography (Svenningsen et al. 2015a; Svenningsen 2016b), and the use of historical oblique aerial photographs as a tool for communicating landscape change (Svenningsen et al. 2015b). A recent study has investigated clandestine Soviet military mapping of Denmark at a scale of 1:50,000, which was based initially on Danish maps and later on remote sensing from satellite imagery during the Cold War from the 1950s to 1980s (Svenningsen 2020; Svenningsen & Perner 2020). Svenningsen has also taken part in a pilot study to develop automated production of digitized geodata of land categories (historical land use and land cover) from 19th century Danish 1:20,000 topographic maps (Levin et al. 2020). In another recent article, Svenningsen (2021) discusses the use of digitized historical maps as a source for studying the history of mapping and exemplifies this with military maps ranging from the Danish General Staff’s topographical mapping in the early 19th century to the Soviet military maps from the period of the Cold War in the second half of the 20th century. Andreas Aagaard Christensen has since 2018 worked as an assistant professor at the Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management at the University of Copenhagen. His principal research fields are environmental management, rural planning and environmental history. For his doctoral thesis, he used historical maps and archival sources to study the environmental history of agricultural landscapes in Denmark and New Zealand from the 17th century to the present in a comparative perspective (Christensen 2013; 2016). Later publications include encyclopedia articles on environmental history and landscape ecology (Christensen et al. 2017; Pawson & Christensen 2017). His recent work has focused on how contemporary environmental management and planning paradigms relate to and are embedded within environmental histories of the modern period (Christensen et al. 2019; Primdahl et al. 2018; Fertner et al. 2019).