Progressive Geographies

The Virtual Mappa Project and Digita Mappa: Online editions of Medieval Maps from the British Library and elsewhere – full update from Cat Crossley here.

After a long journey and much hard work from a lot of very dedicated people, it is time to get excited about medieval maps again! The Virtual Mappa Project has been officially released as an open access publication, with an incredible collection of digitised medieval world maps from the British Library and beyond, all online, annotated and waiting to be explored.

Back in 2013 I was hard at work in the BL Maps department, tasked with marking up some marvellous medieval mappaemundi. At that time I documented my work and the project’s progress in a few blogs posts, including this overview available here. To recap, the British Library has lent its medieval manuscripts, imaging studios and hive-mind of expertise to the DM project, to help create a corpus of digital editions of medieval world maps in a visually navigable, text-searchable, translated format, that makes their intricacies much more accessible to modern minds. A full history of DM and everyone involved can be found here and it is fair to say there have been some technical hiccups along the way (hence the slight delay in publication), but we are now ready to unveil the finished product and I must admit I’m very excited.

Laura Vaughan, Mapping Society: The Spatial Dimensions of Social Cartography – UCL Press, September 2018 (open access)

From a rare map of yellow fever in eighteenth-century New York, to Charles Booth’s famous maps of poverty in nineteenth-century London, an Italian racial zoning map of early twentieth century Asmara, to a map of wealth disparities in the banlieues of twenty-first-century Paris, Mapping Society traces the evolution of social cartography over the past two centuries. In this richly illustrated book, Laura Vaughan examines maps of ethnic or religious difference, poverty, and health inequalities, demonstrating how they not only serve as historical records of social enquiry, but also constitute inscriptions of social patterns that have been etched deeply on the surface of cities.

The book covers themes such as the use of visual rhetoric to change public opinion, the evolution of sociology as an academic practice, changing attitudes to physical disorder, and the complexity of segregation as an urban phenomenon. While the focus is on historical maps, the narrative carries the discussion of the spatial dimensions of social cartography forward to the present day, showing how disciplines such as public health, crime science, and urban planning chart spatial data in their current practice. Containing examples of space syntax analysis alongside historical maps and photographs, this volume will appeal to all those interested in the long-term forces that shape how people live in cities.

Katherine Ibbett, Compassion’s Edge: Fellow-Feeling and Its Limits in Early Modern France – U Penn Press, 2017. Late coming to this one, which won the 2018 Society for Renaissance Studies Book Prize.

“This is in every respect a brilliant and path-breaking book. Katherine Ibbett is ferociously smart, wonderfully humane, a gloriously playful and lucid writer, and a genuinely gifted close reader. Compassion’s Edge will provoke a great deal of discussion and debate, opening new avenues of reflection and research.”—Christopher Braider, University of Colorado at Boulder

“Compassion’s Edge is an intellectually invigorating and original study. Its finely shaded and relentlessly probing investigation never ceases to interest. Katherine Ibbett is astonishing in her ability to synthesize, in a nuanced yet dynamic fashion, a broad spectrum of critical approaches and theoretical angles on the one hand and, on the other, to draw together an impressive range of historical documents and primary literary sources.”—Larry Norman, author of The Shock of the Ancient: Literature and History in Early Modern France

Compassion’s Edge examines the language of fellow-feeling—pity, compassion, and charitable care—that flourished in France in the period from the Edict of Nantes in 1598, which established some degree of religious toleration, to the official breakdown of that toleration with the Revocation of the Edict in 1685. This is not, however, a story about compassion overcoming difference but one of compassion reinforcing division: the seventeenth-century texts of fellow-feeling led not to communal concerns but to paralysis, misreading, and isolation. Early modern fellow-feeling drew distinctions, policed its borders, and far from reaching out to others, kept the other at arm’s length. It became a central feature in the debates about the place of religious minorities after the Wars of Religion, and according to Katherine Ibbett, continues to shape the way we think about difference today.

Compassion’s Edge ranges widely over genres, contexts, and geographies. Ibbett reads epic poetry, novels, moral treatises, dramatic theory, and theological disputes. She takes up major figures such as D’Aubigné, Montaigne, Lafayette, Corneille, and Racine, as well as less familiar Jesuit theologians, Huguenot ministers, and nuns from a Montreal hospital. Although firmly rooted in early modern studies, she reflects on the ways in which the language of compassion figures in contemporary conversations about national and religious communities. Investigating the affective undertow of religious toleration, Compassion’s Edge provides a robust corrective to today’s hope that fellow-feeling draws us inexorably and usefully together.

Mark Polizzotti, Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto – MIT Press, April 2018