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Cartes, atlas, géographies, cosmographies, récits, paysages et vues de villes s’entrecroisent et constituent le laboratoire de l’émergence d'un nouveau regard sur le monde. Ce numéro exceptionnel sur Penser les savoirs géographiques entre le XVe et le XIXe siècle tend à identifier les contextes intellectuels et les pratiques qui éclairent la caractérisation et le statut du savoir géographique à des époques successives et à comprendre l’articulation de ces grands moments. Dans le discours géographique, au-delà de la description de l’espace et de l’ailleurs, se dévoile un discours multiscalaire sur soi, sur le territoire, l’identité et le rapport au monde.
It includes an article by our Member Colin Dupont: Du texte à l’image. Les plans de Jacques de Deventer, un exemple d’appropriation cartographique de l’espace ?
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An article by Nathan Braccio in Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, University of Pennsylvania Press, Volume 19, Number 3, Summer 2021 pp. 457-494.
This article argues that English colonists in New England chose not to make maps between 1620 and 1642 because they had more suitable techniques and technologies available to them, including the superior knowledge of their Algonquian neighbors and their own traditional approaches to measuring land. However, internal and external pressures eventually forced the colonists to begin making maps. As population and demand for land rapidly increased in New England in the 1640s and beyond, the early attempts of the English at cooperative distribution of land were abandoned in favor of a system that emphasized private property, and, consequently, precise boundaries. In these new circumstances, maps served as a powerful tool that settlers used to claim land and defend it from encroachment. Finally, the creation of the Dominion of New England and the arrival of royal officials and map makers in the 1680s completed the transition to a cartographic spatial culture. Despite this, New Englanders had ignored revolutionary developments in map making taking place in England for decades and created a spatial culture unique to New England.
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The Journal of Map and Geography Libraries announces the publication of a special issue devoted to the topic of provenance, entitled That Map Belonged to Somebody: The Importance of Provenance to Map Librarians. The editors anticipate that this issue will be of interest to the staff and friends of the Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress, as the final article provides a history of the Geography and Map Division’s Summer Project programme, which spanned the last half of the twentieth century. In addition, this issue includes a remembrance of Ed Redmond, while the other articles touch on the Library of Congress in one way or another. The introductory editorial and abstracts of all the articles are currently available online, as are the full articles for subscribers to the journal. The hard copy version of this issue will appear later this year.
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From 14 July 2021, the website of the Tchiweka Documentation Association (ATD) is open to the public, putting online a large part of the archive that, since 2006, its Documentation Center has been managing, organizing and expanding.
Starting with the thousands of documents collected by Lúcio Lara “Tchiweka” (1929-2016), a well-known combatant of the Angolan liberation struggle and a prominent leader of the MPLA, the archive has increased its collection with other personal contributions and with the Project “Angola – Paths to Independence” (2010-2015).
This online archive has digitized several documents that may be of interest to map historians, including an 89-page manuscript letter by a Cuban combatant on map reading.
Link to the maps : https://www.tchiweka.org/pesquisa?keys=mapa&page=0.

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Contents

  • Pictures at an Exhibition
    • La Fábrica del Mundo (Luis A. Robles Macías)
  • Looks at books
    • Cartes des mers, by Katherine Parker and Barry Ruderman (Christiane De Craecker-Dussart)
    • Le Nord de la Renaissance by Pierre-Ange Salvadori (Luis A. Robles Macías)
  • History and Cartography
    • The Big Four (Marguerite Silvestre and Caroline De Candt)
    • An Itinerary Guide (Francis Herbert)
  • Miscellaneous
    • 38th IMCoS Symposium update
    • News from Malta

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To avoid missing your online conferences, a time converter can be useful! Here is a suitable site.

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The Directors of Imago Mundi Ltd are pleased to announce that the ninth Imago Mundi Prize has been awarded to Ingrid Houssaye Michienzi and Emmanuelle Vagnon for their article Commissioning and Use of Charts Made in Majorca c.1400: New Evidence from a Tuscan Merchant’s Archive (Imago Mundi 71:1 (2019): 22–33).
Dr Houssaye Michienzi and Dr Vagnon are researchers at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), respectively at the research units Orient & Méditerranée and Laboratoire de Médiévistique Occidentale de Paris.
The successful article sheds new and fascinating light on the demand for and circulation of portolan charts at the turn of the fifteenth century. Drs Houssaye Michienzi and Vagnon’s original research interrogates a resource little known to map historians, the archive of the merchant Francesco Datini, in Prato, Italy. This remarkable collection of business records and correspondence provides valuable insights into the commission, edition, distribution, reception and use of charts and maps prepared by Majorcan cartographers for Mediterranean elites at the dawn of the modern map trade. The archive includes a number of orders for charts from Majorca, one of the major chart-making centres in the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages. The letters give information on prices, the length of time it took to make a chart, and its destination. The archive also contains information on how the charts were packed and transported. From these sources, the authors conclude that the charts appear to have served not only to prepare for business trips, but also to embody the memory of these trips.
The article addresses a long-standing debate about the function and use of portolan charts—whether they are to be interpreted as scientific and navigational instruments or should be seen in broader cultural terms as reflections of the worldly interests of their wealthy and powerful patrons. Drs Houssaye Michienzi and Vagnon’s impressive research provides hitherto-elusive detailed and remarkably extensive evidence to show that the motives for possessing these charts were indeed complex. At the same time their work deepens our understanding of the networks within which the late-medieval map and chart trade operated, including the practices of chart making itself and its place in Mediterranean trade and politics more generally.
The Imago Mundi prize is offered every two years for the article judged to have made the most significant contribution to the discipline. This award covers volumes 70 (2018) and 71 (2019). Only full-length articles, which are automatically subjected to the (anonymous) external refereeing process before acceptance for publication, are eligible for the prize.
The prize is USD 1000.00 and qualifies the recipients for a J. B. Harley Travel Award to the forthcoming biennial International Conference on the History of Cartography, which will now be held in Bucharest in July 2022.
The Imago Mundi Prize is generously sponsored by the late Kenneth Nebenzahl and Mrs Jossy Nebenzahl.
Through the courtesy of our publishers, Routledge Journals (Taylor & Francis), this article is now available free of charge on their website: https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/journal-prize-ah-imago-mundi-prize-articles/.
Tony Campbell, Chairman, Imago Mundi Ltd

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