Map Worlds: A History of Women in Cartography

3. The Thirteenth to Seventeenth Centuries

29 CHAPTER 3 The Thirteenth to Seventeenth Centuries The period between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries in the Western world coincided with huge transformations that deeply affected map worlds: the rise of the Church to a height of tremendous secular power and authority, the appearance of the Renaissance, the advancement of technology , world-encircling discoveries that brought cartography into its wake, and the early signposts of science and rational thought that would start challenging the hegemony of the Church itself. Initially, European maps had more symbolic and moral aims than practical ones, whereby the “T-O” maps served as “pictorial representations of Church dogma” (Tooley, 1978: 12).1 The Renaissance loosened many cultural enterprises from the moorings of the Church and permitted map-makers to free themselves of the theological structures imposed by the “T-O” maps. It was a period when the slightest attempt to alter conventional map design (e.g., the use of nonGothic script) might lead to prison, as it did for Mercator; at least one other cartographer was sent to his death (van den Hoonaard, 2010). Voyages of discovery stimulated awareness of areas hitherto unknown. Map ateliers were the new phenomenon that could create the demands of new technologies that further down the road allowed for the mass production of maps. The making of multiple exact copies of maps and their rapid dissemination become a reality. CHAPTER 3 30 The engagement of women in the map world reflected these cultural shifts. The creation of the “T-O” maps in the medieval epoch were largely the outcome of work within monasteries and some cloisters; in the latter case, a number of women stepped into the map world to produce striking maps. These locations, hitherto infused with a theological spirit, eventually gave way to map ateliers that began to rely on the introduction of Ptolemy ’s Geographia and on new technology to produce maps on a larger scale (Thrower, 1996: 58). Run by households, the map ateliers became the cynosure of planning and organization, relying increasingly on women for the production, colouring, and selling of maps to fulfill the restless demand for ever-newer maps. THE THIRTEENTH AND FOURTEENTH CENTURIES Nancy G. Heller points out that most medieval women were married by fourteen years of age and were preoccupied with childbearing and childrearing , as well as “endless domestic chores” (Heller, 1991: 12). It comes as no surprise that because unmarried women (and especially women in cloisters) were free of these obligations, they “held a remarkable range of jobs, working as brewers and butchers, wool merchants and ironmongers” (Heller, 1991: 12). There are, however, only three claims of the involvement of women in map-making: Ende, Herrade Landberg, and the thirteenthcentury Ebstorf map. Ende, a tenth-century Spanish nun, made a world map, along with illuminating the manuscript of Beatus of Liebana (Heller, 1991: 11–13). Herrade of Hohenbourg (d. after 1196), the Abbess of Lorraine, authored The Garden of Delights, the first known encyclopedia written by a woman. The work contains many examples of symbolic representation of space. Her work indicates , as Hoogvliet suggests (1996), that women were not excluded from geography or cartography. The Ebstorf map2 overlays the known world on the body of Christ and was discovered quite by chance by the overseer nun (chanoiness) at the Ebstorf nunnery in the nineteenth century—around six centuries after its creation , possibly in 1239 or 1284.3 The story of its discovery is nothing short of remarkable. In 1830, the chanoiness checked a storeroom of the former nunnery of Ebstorf, situated near Lunenburg and Brunswick, believing that she would recover religious artifacts. What she found was the original map in thirty parchment pieces. The map was brought over to Hanover where, in 1896, Konrad Miller made a facsimile of it, although heliotype copies had been made in 1888.4 We are fortunate that he made a copy, for bombing THE THIRTEENTH TO SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES 31 raids on Hanover in 1943 destroyed the original, which measured more than 12 square metres (see Figure 3.2). The map is the largest known mappaemundi, a medieval term to refer to these “didactic and symbolic” maps that served “to present the faithful with moralized versions of Christian history from the Creation to the Last Judgment” (Harley and Woodward, 1987: 504). It conveys a deeply religious meaning, as the map is superimposed on the body of Christ. East, as was common...