The Guardian today posted a gallery of old map images, to tie in with a book newly out looking at maps charting the development of cities. There’s also a related podcast, where map experts Simon Garfield and Jerry Brotton talk about Maps from Ptolemy to Google.
I used maps a lot in my taught postgraduate MPhil degree which was studying Cultural and Urban Histories 1650-1850. Maps are a wonderful tool for viewing changing urban layouts, and understanding how towns worked in the past, figuring out the relationship between different areas and different functions, and also the relationship between a town and its surrounding hinterlands. Of course we relied on maps being created in the first place and still surviving today. I remember once finding a reference in the town council minutes to a map created of Montrose in Angus in the 1740s, but the map couldn’t be found now in the local archives. It may be lurking somewhere still though, as part of the unprocessed Montrose burgh collection held locally, and if it survived would be a fascinating glimpse into what the town looked like then.
There are lots of collections of old maps online. As a Scottish researcher I particularly like the National Library of Scotland’s digitised maps collection. This includes large area maps, for counties and countryside, as well as town plans, such as John Wood’s famous ones from the 1820s. Wood’s town plans capture Scottish towns in a period of considerable change, where old medieval structures and roads were often being transformed to a new urban layout. He also surveyed a number of more recently-established towns, which had quite a different physical layout from those with a medieval legacy.
I studied an Open University senior honours art history course last year, purely for fun, and for my end of course project I analysed Barbari’s groundbreaking plan of Venice circa 1500. There are various surviving prints of this map around the world. I saw one in the Museo Correr in Venice, the civic museum in the Piazza San Marco. And my jaw hit the floor when I walked into the room. This is a map on a massive scale, spread across six printed sheets, over a total area of 135 by 282 cm. The level of detail is staggering, but hard to appreciate when you’re standing at a distance from the map. Luckily there is a good digitised copy, thanks to a modern Venetian architect. I would recommend checking this out.
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Very interesting. I wonder whether cities in Latin America would have a similar rich history of maps, for example, Lima, Mexico City, Buenos Aires.
I would suspect that they’re likely to be at least as good as Scotland, where detailed town maps only survive in large numbers from circa 1800 onwards. Before then only the largest cities tended to have plans drawn from time to time that still survive today. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if there are much earlier maps for the larger Latin American cities as well. And yes there’s a 16th century one for Mexico City: see http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300180718 I also remember once seeing a book about city plans from Latin America from a similar period, native south American maps created around the time of the Spanish invasion. Possibly this book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mapping-New-Spain-Cartography-Geograficas/dp/0226550966/
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`the ways we know the past are words, paintings, maps and music and maps might be the greatest illusions of them all./…