Remote Seminar
Medieval & Early Modern Cartography: An Introduction
Dr. Karen Rose Mathews
Mediterranean Studies Summer Skills Seminar
21–24 July 2025, 12-2pm & 3-5pm ET/10am-12pm & 1-3pm MDT
Applications Due 28 April 2025
This Summer Skills Seminar provides participants with an overview of key concepts and methodologies in the study of Mediterranean and Early Modern cartography and the interpretation of maps. The course will address the themes of mobility, connectivity, and encounter in relation to the visual culture of peoples and territories across the sea. Participants will acquire an art historical tool kit to assist them in conducting their own research on the visual culture and artistic production of the medieval Mediterranean.
Course overview:
Over the course of the Middle Ages, cartographic works came to play a significant role in Mediterranean visual culture. This Summer Skills course addresses the importance of maps in medieval and early modern society in terms of their production, function, display, and their contribution to a mapping mentality. In the course of four days we will study different types of maps from Islamic and Christian territories in relation to their form, content, function, and context. This course will not be addressing cartographic works in terms of their geographical accuracy or contribution to scientific knowledge; rather they will be assessed as material, visual, and aesthetic products and as repositories of a newly formulated system of signs that promoted novel ways of seeing. We will work here to integrate maps more fully into art historical discourses while analyzing them as ideological objects. Art historians have long acknowledged the non-transparent nature of visual imagery and the inquiry of cartographic works undertaken in this course will illuminate the great power that maps had for their producers and consumers.
For more information about the program and to apply, click here for the website and here for a PDF.