Ships, Geography, and Humanism

Abstract

The mid sixteenth century marked a watershed in the character of maps and their place in the thinking and practices of Europeans. So too did the second half of the thirteenth when the Oxford Franciscan Roger Bacon described the use of a grid of latitude and longitude, when Raymond Lull in the Balearics called for the greater use of maps, and when the first surviving portolan chart was made.1 In the period between about 1250 and about 1550 European cartography changed beyond all recognition. While the later date is not definitive and should be understood somewhat loosely, still in the middle of the sixteenth century the pattern was set in the production of maps and in the forms and types of decoration for those maps, including having ships on the oceans. In those years up to 1550 the bringing together of scholarly work on geography and the practical experience of navigators combined with information generated by voyages of discovery to create new kinds of cartography and to change what had been charts for sailors into world maps with claims to universality. While, ‘The sixteenth-century world map became known as a cosmographia, and the oval world projection became a pervasive cosmographical icon for modernity, universality, and the integration of heaven and earth.’2 that transformation in the scope, the use, and the assessment of the value of maps applied not just to charts or world maps but to all maps no matter their topic or coverage.