A Master Mapper

Abstract

Prior to his untimely death in March 2008, Denis Cosgrove was rightly acclaimed as one of the defining figures in the new cultural geography that had emerged from the discipline’s encounter with critical theory from the 1980s. Over three decades of research, teaching and writing, Cosgrove pioneered a new direction for his field, thanks to his extraordinary ability to write as easily about classical geography as sixteenth-century Italian urban planning, twentieth-century landscape, and geospatial mapping applications like Google Earth. Among his peers he will perhaps be best remembered for his study of the idea and practice of landscape. For Cosgrove, the notion of landscape required attention to its quasi-legal German roots, as well as to its more English association with aesthetic and pictorial representation. However, unlike more strictly cartographic historians such as J. B. Harley, whose 1980s essays on the history of mapping took on a heavily post-structuralist inflection to argue for a ‘hidden agenda’ in the creation of landscape and mapping, Cosgrove resisted conspiratorial interpretations, arguing instead for a more nuanced understanding of the social, political, imaginative and artistic forces that mould terrestrial representations. It is this approach that informs the essays in Geography and Vision, with its exploration of the ‘strongly pictorial terms’ of landscape, map and vision.