New Essay Published (with download link)

New essay just published in Imago Mundi 75, no. 1 (2023): 1–22:

The First Facsimile Collections and the Parisian Origins of the History of Cartography

ABSTRACT: Map historians have long thought that their field of study has an exceptional origin, springing into life fully-fledged in Paris in the 1840s when the Frenchman Edme-François Jomard and the Portuguese visconde de Santarém created large collections of facsimiles of medieval and Renaissance maps and then squabbled over credit for creating the ‘history of cartography’. This essay revises the story by adducing three earlier and much smaller collections by the Prussian Alexander von Humboldt, the Spaniard Ramón de la Sagra, and the French couple Xavier and Adèle Hommaire de Hell. The existence of these collections has hitherto been obscured by common bibliographical practices. This essay analyses the structure and design of all these facsimile collections and reads them in concert with their accompanying texts to reveal the emergence in Paris in the 1830s and 1840s of a scholarly concern for the comparative study of early maps. Together, these scholars wove existing threads of scholarship in the history of geography and discovery into a new field of study. The history of cartography thus possesses a communal and Western European rather than an idiosyncratic and national origin.

KEYWORDS: Facsimile atlas, history of cartography, history of geography, history of discovery, historiography, Edme-François Jomard, visconde de Santarém, Alexander von Humboldt, Ramón de la Sagra, Xavier and Adèle Hommaire de Hell, Western Europe, history of ideas, book history.

There are 50 (now 48) free downloads available from the publisher. If you are interested in this topic and will actually read the paper, please download it from: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/T4VHZD5TWX6N2RHCRMR7/full?target=10.1080/03085694.2023.2226951 

But please don’t download it if all you are going to do is let it sit on your hard drive!