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The transformation of the medieval European image of the world in the period following the Great Discoveries of the 15th and 16th centuries is the subject of this volume. The first studies deal specifically with the emergence of the concept of the terraqueous globe. In the following pieces Dr Randles looks at the advances in Portuguese navigation and cartography that helped sailors overcome the obstacles to the circumnavigation of Africa and the crossing of the Atlantic, and at the impact of the Discoveries on European culture and science. Other articles are concerned with Portuguese naval artillery, and with attempts to classify the indigenous societies of the newly-discovered lands and to map the interior of Africa.
In 1400 Europe was behind large parts of the world in its understanding of the use of maps. For instance, the people gf China and of Japan were considerably more advanced in this respect. And yet, by 1600 the Europeans had come to use maps for a huge variety of tasks, and were far ahead of the rest of the world in their appreciation of the power and use of cartography. The Mapmakers' Quest seeks to understand this development - not only to tease out the strands of thought and practice which led to the use of maps, but also to assess the ways in which such use affected European societies and economies. Taking as a starting point the question of why there were so few maps in Europe in 1400 and so many by 1650, the book explores the reasons for this and its implications for European history. It examines, inter al, how mapping and military technology advanced in tandem, how modern states' territories were mapped and borders drawn up, the role of maps in shaping the urban environment, and cartography's links to the new sciences.
When the University of Chicago Press launched the landmark History of Cartography series nearly thirty years ago, founding editors J.B. Harley and David Woodward hoped to create a new basis for map history. They did not, however, anticipate the larger renaissance in map studies that the series would inspire. But as the renown of the series and the comprehensiveness and acuity of the present volume demonstrate, the history of cartography has proven to be unexpectedly fertile ground. Cartography in the European Renaissance treats the period from 1450 to 1650, long considered the most important in the history of European mapping. This period witnessed a flowering in the production of maps comparable to that in the fields of literature and fine arts. Scientific advances, appropriations of classical mapping techniques, burgeoning trade routes--all such massive changes drove an explosion in the making and using of maps. While this volume presents detailed histories of mapping in such well-documented regions as Italy and Spain, it also breaks significant new ground by treating Renaissance Europe in its most expansive geographical sense, giving careful attention to often-neglected regions like Scandinavia, East-Central Europe, and Russia, and by providing innovative interpretive essays on the technological, scientific, cultural, and social aspects of cartography. Lavishly illustrated with more than a thousand maps, many in color, the two volumes of Cartography in the European Renaissance will be the unsurpassable standard in its field, both defining it and propelling it forward.
The sixteenth century in France was marked by religious warfare and shifting political and physical landscapes. Between 1549 and 1584, however, the Pléiade poets, including Pierre de Ronsard, Joachim Du Bellay, Rémy Belleau, and Antoine de Baïf, produced some of the most abiding and irenic depictions of rural French landscapes ever written. In The Poetry of Place, Louisa Mackenzie reveals and analyzes the cultural history of French paysage through her study of lyric poetry and its connections with landscape painting, cartography, and land use history. In the face of destructive environmental change, lyric poets in Renaissance France often wrote about idealized physical spaces, reclaiming the altered landscape to counteract the violence and loss of the period and creating in the process what Mackenzie, following David Harvey, terms 'spaces of hope.' This unique alliance of French Renaissance studies with cultural geography and eco-criticism demonstrates that sixteenth-century poetry created a powerful sense of place which continues to inform national and regional sentiment today.
This book sheds light on the various ways in which classical authors and the Bible were commented on by neo-Latin writers between 1400 and 1700.
A unique overview of Portuguese oceanic expansion between 1400 and 1800, the essays in this volume treat a wide range of subjects - economy and society, politics and institutions, cultural configurations and comparative dimensions - and radically update data and interpretations on the economic and financial trends of the Portuguese Empire. Interregional networks are analysed in a substantial way. Patterns of settlement, political configurations, ecclesiastical structures, and local powers are put in global context. Language and literature, the arts, and science and technology are revisited with refreshing and innovative approaches. The interaction between Portuguese and local people is studied in different contexts, while the entire imperial and colonial culture of the Portuguese world is looked at synthetically for the first time. In short, this book provides a broad understanding of the Portuguese Empire in its first four centuries as a factor in world history and as a major component of European expansion.
This book presents groundbreaking new research on a fifteenth-century world map by Henricus Martellus, c. 1491, now at Yale. The importance of the map had long been suspected, but it was essentially unstudiable because the texts on it had faded to illegibility. Multispectral imaging of the map, performed with NEH support in 2014, rendered its texts legible for the first time, leading to renewed study of the map by the author. This volume provides transcriptions, translations, and commentary on the Latin texts on the map, particularly their sources, as well as the place names in several regions. This leads to a demonstration of a very close relationship between the Martellus map and Martin Waldseemüller’s famous map of 1507. One of the most exciting discoveries on the map is in the hinterlands of southern Africa. The information there comes from African sources; the map is thus a unique and supremely important document regarding African cartography in the fifteenth century. This book is essential reading for digital humanitarians and historians of cartography.
One of the most puzzling lapses in accounts of the rise of the West following the decline of the Roman Empire is the casual way historians have dealt with Gutenberg's invention of printing. The cultural achievements that followed the fifteenth century, when the West moved from relative backwardness to remarkable, robust cultural achievement, would have been impossible without Gutenberg's gift and its subsequent widespread adoption across most of the world. Richard Abel follows the radical cultural impact of the printing revolution from the eighth century to the Renaissance, addressing the viability of the new Christian/Classical culture. Although this culture proved too fragile to endure, those who salvaged it managed to preserve elements of the Classical substance together with the Bible and all the writings of the Church Fathers. The cultural upsurge of the Renaissance (fourteenth to seventeenth centuries), which resulted in part from Gutenberg's invention, is a major focus of this book. Abel aims to delineate how the cultural revolution was shaped by the invention of printing. He evaluates its impact on the rapid reorientation and acceleration of the cultural evolution in the West. This book provides insight into the history of the printed word, the roots of modern-day mass book production, and the promise of the electronic revolution. It is an essential work in the history of ideas.
How was Spain able to govern its enormous colonial territories? In 1573 the king decreed that his councilors should acquire "complete knowledge" about the empire they were running from out of Madrid, and he initiated an impressive program for the systematic collection of empirical knowledge. Brendecke shows why this knowledge was created in the first place – but then hardly used. And he looks into the question of what political effects such a policy of knowledge had for Spain’s colonial rule.
The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Early Modern Spanish Literature and Culture introduces the intellectual and artistic breadth of early modern Spain from a range of disciplinary and critical perspectives. Spanning the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (a period traditionally known as the Golden Age), the volume examines topics including political and scientific culture, literary and artistic innovations, and religious and social identities and institutions in transformation. The 36 chapters of the volume include both expert overviews of key topics and figures from the period as well as new approaches to understudied questions and materials. This invaluable resource will be of interest to advanced students and scholars in Hispanic studies, as well as Renaissance and early modern studies more generally.