Renaissance maps and the construction of the idea of Europe

The paper assumes that maps have the power to affect perceptions of power and space, and takes as a case study the portrayals of the continent of Europe during the Renaissance, when a number of fundamental shifts took place. The voyages of exploration, the rediscovery of Ptolemy, and changes in theology and philosophy permitted an emancipation from medieval constraints. An early effect was to make Europe seem smaller in relation to the rest of the world, but new projection techniques placed Europe both central and dominant on the world map, and it was made yet larger by shifting its border with Asia eastward. Triumphalism entered the portrayal of Europe in the world, helped by Habsburg pretensions. By personifying the continents as young women, and making Europe the noblest and most regal of them, iconography asserted Europe's superiority over the other regions of the world. Renaissance cartographers devised maps of Europe in the shape of a queen, decorated all manner of geographical books with images of the «noble» continent lording it over her «sisters», and covered the margins and cartouches of their maps with the images of European superiority. Only the rise of nationalism and imperialism eventually diluted this assertion of Europe.     

Ships on Maps: Pictures of Power in Renaissance Europe. By Richard W. Unger

Abstract

In the Reclus-Perron cartographical collection held in the Public Library of Geneva, a recently discovered map by the explorer Henri Coudreau seems to have been essential, together with other published and unpublished cartographic materials, in deciding the 1900 Swiss arbitration of the Franco-Brazilian border dispute. These materials provide an opportunity not only to analyse the political power of maps, but also to explore a different European way of conceiving maps and geography, that of anarchist geographers, which diverged from the uncritical hagiographies of colonialism and geographical discoveries that were typical in European science during the Age of Empire (1875?1914).