Walter Goffart
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- March 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226300719
- eISBN:
- 9780226300726
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226300726.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, World Early Modern History
Today we can walk into any well-stocked bookstore or library and find an array of historical atlases. This book traces how these collections of “maps for history”—maps whose sole purpose was to ...
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Today we can walk into any well-stocked bookstore or library and find an array of historical atlases. This book traces how these collections of “maps for history”—maps whose sole purpose was to illustrate some historical moment or scene—came into being. Beginning in the sixteenth century, and continuing down to the late nineteenth, it discusses milestones in the origins of historical atlases as well as individual maps illustrating historical events in alternating, paired chapters. The author focuses on maps of the medieval period because the development of maps for history hinged particularly on portrayals of this segment of the postclassical, “modern” past. The book concludes with a detailed catalogue of more than 700 historical maps and atlases produced from 1570 to 1870.Less
Today we can walk into any well-stocked bookstore or library and find an array of historical atlases. This book traces how these collections of “maps for history”—maps whose sole purpose was to illustrate some historical moment or scene—came into being. Beginning in the sixteenth century, and continuing down to the late nineteenth, it discusses milestones in the origins of historical atlases as well as individual maps illustrating historical events in alternating, paired chapters. The author focuses on maps of the medieval period because the development of maps for history hinged particularly on portrayals of this segment of the postclassical, “modern” past. The book concludes with a detailed catalogue of more than 700 historical maps and atlases produced from 1570 to 1870.
