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What Can You Do With a Maritime Atlas?

April 21, 2011 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

A map from Dudley's Arcano

I was wondering until the last minute if we’d have enough students to justify this “undergraduate seminar” featuring the JCB’s collection of maritime atlases, but it turns out I should not have worried.  We pulled in about 10 eager Brown students, mostly from Jean Feerick’s Shakespeare class, and one intrepid voyager from U Conn Avery Point, who came with his professor, Mary K Bercaw-Edwards.  We also drew in a few other Oceaners who had arrived early, the JCB’s rare books curator, and all in all the room was pretty full.  Atlases are big!

Susan Danforth, the brilliant and deeply knowledgable maps curator, led a tour that started with a hand-colored 1480s Ptolomy, then quickly showed the shock of discovery in a gorgeous 1511 Italian Portolan chart, that showed how old Mediterranean cartographic habits struggled to make sense out of the strange new vistas of Africa and the West Indies. 

This is not the portolan we saw

A few of my favorites were on display — Dudley’s Arcano del Mare, which some call the most beautiful of all 17c atlases, and the less opulent Altas Maritimus & Commercialis, which was purportedly ghost-written by Daniel Defoe and about which I built a web-interactive site for the Folger show last summer.

A map from the Altas Maritime & Commercialis, 1728

These huge, ungainly books show the technical challenge posed by the maritime: the ocean and its coastlines are simply too big and complex to represent simply.  I take these atlases to diplay on a very literal level the shock of the transoceanic turn, and the effort of early modern cartographers, sailors, and others to transform watery disorder into something legible, usuable, and even marketable. 

A good way to start!

Filed Under: Blue Humanities, Hungry Ocean

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About Steve

Steve Mentz
Professor of English
St. John’s University
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Shakespearean. Ecocritic. Swimmer. New book Ocean #objectsobjects Professor at St. John's in NYC. #bluehumanities #pluralizetheanthropocene

stevermentz
stevermentz Steve Mentz @stevermentz ·
21h

I bought my ticket to this play a day before @SAAupdates secured this discount - but you should take advantage of it now!

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stevermentz Steve Mentz @stevermentz ·
17 Mar

So great to see this book out in the world! I’ve got a shipwreck piece in it, alongside great stuff by Graham Harman @wracksandruins @peterbcampbell & many others!

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