Class Year
2013
Document Type
Student Research Paper
Date of Creation
Fall 2012
Department 1
Art
Department 2
Interdisciplinary Studies
Abstract
This paper situates Dutch mapmaker Willem Blaeu’s Asia noviter delineata—part of the Stuckenberg Map Collection in the Gettysburg College Special Collections—within the larger framework of Renaissance thought and a shifting colonial balance of power. The map’s pictorial marginalia expresses a Dutch quest for empirical knowledge that echoed contemporary cabinets of curiosities throughout early modern Europe. Similar to these cabinets, Blaeu’s map can be seen as a cartographic teatro mundi, used to propagate Dutch hegemony through both a robust naval presence and an expanding geographic and natural knowledge of the world.
Copyright Note
This is the author's version of the work. This publication appears in Gettysburg College's institutional repository by permission of the copyright owner for personal use, not for redistribution.
Recommended Citation
Poorman, Joshua W., "Willem Blaeu's 'Asia noviter delineata': Expressions of Power through Naval Might and Natural Knowledge in Dutch Mapmaking" (2012). Student Publications. 290.
https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/student_scholarship/290
Included in
Cultural History Commons, Dutch Studies Commons, European History Commons, European Languages and Societies Commons, Geographic Information Sciences Commons, History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons, Human Geography Commons
Comments
This paper was written for ARTH/IDS 284: Wonders of Nature and Artifice: The Renaissance Quest for Knowledge, Fall 2012.