How Did Maps Change During The Age Of Exploration

Maps, Knowledge, and Power in Medieval and Renaissance Europe

Maps are a representation of geographical space. As such, they are valuable as a source of information. Yet their makers can also apply them to command or change perceptions of that aforementioned information. In the 14th and 15th centuries, cartography, or the scientific discipline of map-making, changed rapidly due to the explorations of the Americas. Use the maps below to trace some of these changes.

Primary Sources:

Mappa mundi,Hereford, c.1300

Annotation: The Herefordmappa mundi, or map of the world, is function of an ancient map-making tradition. Maps in medieval Europe were typically produced by religious men and represented a particularly Christian, Euro-centric indicate of view. These maps were not used for navigation, but rather to demonstrate ideas nearly the earth.

What does the map correspond?
What countries or regions does information technology bear witness?
What is missing?
What is in the center of the map? Why?

Universalis Cosmographia, Martin Waldseemuller, 1507

Annotation: Martin Waldseemuller (c.1470-1521) was a German language cartographer. His map was part of a project to incorporate all of the new geographic information obtained by explorers to the New Globe. Waldseemuller represented a new, humanistic fashion of perceiving the world that was based upon Ancient Greek traditions. Waldseemuller, and other cartographers in this period, saw medieval map-making as fanciful and based upon myth rather than homo cognition. (This map has also become famous because it is the kickoff-known use of the designation America.)

How is Europe represented?
How are the Americas represented? What sections are most detailed
Look at the way Europe is shown as compared to the New Globe. What does this tell yous almost what Europeans believed they knew about the New World?

Representation of Due north America, John Senex, London, 1710

Annotation: By the 18th century, modernistic map-making was built-in. Cartographers based their maps upon the reports of sailors and explorers, and also upon the results of their own survey work.

Where is the map near detailed?
Where is the map to the lowest degree detailed?
How did mapmakers represent lesser known areas?

Secondary Sources:

Monmonier, Marking Southward.How to lie with maps, 2nd edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Monmonier brings a critical heart to the science of cartography, using a range of examples to show how cartographers must distort the information they nowadays to represent a three-dimensional world on the page. A useful survey by a geographer about how to clarify and understand map-making.

Thrower, Norman J.West.Maps & civilization: Cartography in culture and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Printing, 1996.

A concise survey of the history of cartography.

Grafton, Anthony, with Apr Shelford and Nancy Siraisi.New worlds, aboriginal texts: The power of tradition and the shock of discovery. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Printing, 1992.

Originally accompanying an exhibition, this richly illustrated book conveys the intellectual impact of the age of exploration on European thinkers.

In the Classroom

Present your students with two different maps. Have them compare and dissimilarity what they come across.

– What is at the center of the map?
– What is at the edges?
– Where is the most item?
– Where is the to the lowest degree detail?
– How are these maps different from the maps we utilise today?

Indelible Understanding

– What can maps tell us about how people have understood their earth?
– How did the "discovery"? of the Americas alter European perceptions of the world they inhabited?
– What motivated European powers to invest in map-making? How do the resulting maps reflect those interests?

Relevant Standards:

National History Standards (UCLA)
-3 Worlds Run across (Beginnings to 1620)

Standard 2A: The student understands the stages of European oceanic and overland exploration, amid international rivalries, from the 9th to 17th centuries.

Massachusetts History and Social Science Curriculum Frameworks
Course 5
History and Geography

5.3 Explain why trade routes to Asia had been closed in the 15th century and trace the voyages of at to the lowest degree four of the explorers listed below. Describe what each explorer sought when he began his journeying, what he found, and how his discoveries changed the image of the earth, specially the maps used by explorers. (H, Thou, Eastward)

7. Compare maps of the modern world with historical maps of the world before the Age of Exploration, and draw the changes in 16th and 17th century maps of the world. (G, H, E)