1 00:00:03,540 --> 00:00:10,060 Thank you, Nick, and thank you, Nick and Liz and everyone at the Bodleian for organising this wonderful conference. 2 00:00:10,060 --> 00:00:18,790 My focus today is a small group of world maps produced in Renaissance Normandy, sometimes identified as the D.F. School of Cartography. 3 00:00:18,790 --> 00:00:26,170 Only 20 maps survived from the 16th century, and of these, only 10 are decorated with human figures. 4 00:00:26,170 --> 00:00:30,010 Eight of these days, between 15, 42 and 15. 5 00:00:30,010 --> 00:00:39,590 Fifty five. That is between the failure of the French colony in Canada and before the establishment of an equally ill fated colony in Brazil. 6 00:00:39,590 --> 00:00:44,900 All of the maps are hand painted on parchment or vellum for our large charts. 7 00:00:44,900 --> 00:00:49,370 That would have been consulted on a table before Rebounders books. 8 00:00:49,370 --> 00:00:54,140 Although the maps were based on Iberian or Italian charts used for navigation. 9 00:00:54,140 --> 00:01:00,190 These French examples were intended for connoisseurs and libraries rather than port by pilots on shipboard. 10 00:01:00,190 --> 00:01:03,520 Since the charts in which they were based were somewhat out of date, 11 00:01:03,520 --> 00:01:09,620 they French manuscript maps are more aesthetically delightful than they are geographically accurate. 12 00:01:09,620 --> 00:01:16,460 Many of these beautiful maps are decorated with the coats of arms of French kings and Crown Prince's, as well as those of prominent courtiers. 13 00:01:16,460 --> 00:01:20,450 Although the production circumstances of these maps remains somewhat obscure. 14 00:01:20,450 --> 00:01:30,740 Scholars believe that Norman Privateers used the maps as gifts to court the Crown support and sustenance of transatlantic exploration and enterprise. 15 00:01:30,740 --> 00:01:35,900 So these maps appear to have served to invite investment and they naturally saw. 16 00:01:35,900 --> 00:01:45,650 Therefore, to show the commercial opportunities that were their subject and the best and safest light to maximise benefits and minimise risk. 17 00:01:45,650 --> 00:01:56,690 It's against the backdrop of this financial solicitation that I want to consider how and where and why the figures of women appear on Norman maps. 18 00:01:56,690 --> 00:02:00,340 Manuscript maps were objects of prestige and were decorated by painters. 19 00:02:00,340 --> 00:02:03,130 As you can see here in this example. 20 00:02:03,130 --> 00:02:11,440 Who relied sometimes on motifs from printed maps and also on descriptions from textual sources and firsthand accounts of French sailors. 21 00:02:11,440 --> 00:02:16,150 I believe a case can be made that despite the occasional reuse of printed motifs, 22 00:02:16,150 --> 00:02:23,410 these maps do constitute a cartographic form that was distinctly French for it made for a distinctly French audience. 23 00:02:23,410 --> 00:02:30,970 They differ from other European examples because despite the relative scarcity of women on these sumptuous manuscript maps, 24 00:02:30,970 --> 00:02:39,070 there are many more women on manuscript maps produced in France than are found on the printed maps that circulated more widely in this period. 25 00:02:39,070 --> 00:02:45,220 Most printed examples have no human figures at all, and those that do have only a handful of women. 26 00:02:45,220 --> 00:02:50,710 For example, Mountain Vaults Emulous fifteen sixteen Khartum Rina has one in India, 27 00:02:50,710 --> 00:02:56,140 and Lawrence Freese's slightly later reissue of the same map adds another in the island of Java. 28 00:02:56,140 --> 00:03:00,190 Sebastian Cabot's fifteen forty four map has five. 29 00:03:00,190 --> 00:03:06,040 The woman in India, one in North and one in South America and one on the edge of the world in Northern Asia. 30 00:03:06,040 --> 00:03:12,310 After about fifteen fifty five more women and more human figures generally are to be found on all kinds of maps. 31 00:03:12,310 --> 00:03:15,970 But earlier examples only rarely include them. 32 00:03:15,970 --> 00:03:21,490 Textual sources, like travel accounts written in France and elsewhere, mentioned women in abundant detail. 33 00:03:21,490 --> 00:03:29,850 French authors like Shiell Penalty, Jack Kelty and Andre to the all include more women in their writings than are documented on these maps. 34 00:03:29,850 --> 00:03:33,130 So that further suggests a particular purpose for these manuscript maps, 35 00:03:33,130 --> 00:03:39,040 since they diverge both from the textual and from the visual precedents and circulation at the time. 36 00:03:39,040 --> 00:03:46,990 So the questions I want to answer in relation to the French examples are why are there so few women that is, and in comparison to men? 37 00:03:46,990 --> 00:03:52,690 And also, why are there so many women in comparison to their numbers on printed maps? 38 00:03:52,690 --> 00:04:01,780 What do the women do on the maps? And for the maps, an examination of where the women appear on French maps shed some light on all of these questions. 39 00:04:01,780 --> 00:04:06,280 I should add that generally speaking, it's not difficult to distinguish men from women on these maps. 40 00:04:06,280 --> 00:04:12,700 But there are also some figures of utter ambiguity, and sometimes it's only possible to hazard a guess. 41 00:04:12,700 --> 00:04:17,020 So these are the necessary caveats and focussing on a very narrow time period. 42 00:04:17,020 --> 00:04:20,800 My sample size is small since just a few maps survive. 43 00:04:20,800 --> 00:04:26,200 There aren't many women on such maps as do survive, making inference about their role difficult. 44 00:04:26,200 --> 00:04:30,310 And sometimes when there are female figures, they can be difficult to detect. 45 00:04:30,310 --> 00:04:35,380 These limits naturally raise the question of why we should bother to investigate them at all. 46 00:04:35,380 --> 00:04:41,080 The answer is that our knowledge of these maps is so fragmentary that any effort that helps to decipher their 47 00:04:41,080 --> 00:04:46,660 contents and purposes can help us to better understand them and their place in the history of cartography. 48 00:04:46,660 --> 00:05:05,810 So where are the women? Amongst the scores of sea creatures, clusters of cannibals and multiple monstrous races on French world maps. 49 00:05:05,810 --> 00:05:14,550 The place of women is often minimal and marginal. Here are the four big sheet maps with the female figures circled. 50 00:05:14,550 --> 00:05:20,840 Although these large charts are not the earliest examples, they make it easy to see the distribution of female figures. 51 00:05:20,840 --> 00:05:27,060 A distribution that holds for the bound volumes, there are slightly more women in the maps bound books. 52 00:05:27,060 --> 00:05:29,550 And that's a detail to which I'll return. 53 00:05:29,550 --> 00:05:37,200 Unlike the male figures, which are more or less evenly distributed across the continents, the females are deployed strategically and selectively. 54 00:05:37,200 --> 00:05:44,040 So although we might be inclined to see the rarity of women as evidence of their insignificance in French renaissance cartography, 55 00:05:44,040 --> 00:05:53,720 I think the opposite is true. There's scarcity signals their significance. 56 00:05:53,720 --> 00:06:00,380 The men on maps are many. [INAUDIBLE] and working, writing and ruling, they are dressed in robes and cloak. 57 00:06:00,380 --> 00:06:06,560 Sometimes they hold swords, spears or sceptres. By contrast, women are few. 58 00:06:06,560 --> 00:06:11,360 Mostly mothering their nude or clad in garments that we'd recognise as dresses. 59 00:06:11,360 --> 00:06:17,500 You can see one here, for example. They wield neither spears nor swords. 60 00:06:17,500 --> 00:06:21,820 Instead, they hold children by the hand or in their arms. 61 00:06:21,820 --> 00:06:30,700 They listen while men talk. Sometimes they just stimulate in conversation with men who are about to be bludgeoned to death here. 62 00:06:30,700 --> 00:06:44,970 On occasion, they butcher human figures and sometimes they cook human limbs on fires. 63 00:06:44,970 --> 00:06:55,150 Thus, the depictions of women. On French maps largely confirmed what was already suspected about the lands across the sea. 64 00:06:55,150 --> 00:07:01,060 They were intriguing and enticing and also strange and dangerous. 65 00:07:01,060 --> 00:07:09,250 So let's take a closer look. Starting with the maps of Europe. 66 00:07:09,250 --> 00:07:16,870 Where there are no women at all. One woman can be found on a separate map of the Adriatic to the north of Thessaloniki and to her. 67 00:07:16,870 --> 00:07:24,410 We will return. Amongst the eight maps where eight groups of maps, I've only found a few well hidden women in Africa. 68 00:07:24,410 --> 00:07:29,710 And I'll come back to them, too. In Asia, there are quite a few women. 69 00:07:29,710 --> 00:07:34,360 Here are just a few examples. These women are in. There are few women here in the Caucasus. 70 00:07:34,360 --> 00:07:42,130 This is an atlas that has a page that describes this region and says that there are mountain Jews. 71 00:07:42,130 --> 00:07:48,300 There are Jews who are enclosed by mountains. And there's a woman amongst them. And then there are women in India. 72 00:07:48,300 --> 00:07:54,540 There are women in in other regions in the far reaches of Southeast Asia. 73 00:07:54,540 --> 00:07:59,560 A female figure has the head of a dog. She belongs to the race of the sign, a safley here. 74 00:07:59,560 --> 00:08:03,480 The dog headed people who were first described in antiquity, 75 00:08:03,480 --> 00:08:09,720 and they make frequent appearances on maps throughout the Middle Ages and into the age of print. 76 00:08:09,720 --> 00:08:14,130 Both also Müller and Freeze depict cannibals here, but only on the French map. 77 00:08:14,130 --> 00:08:19,620 Do we see this bipedal dog in a dress with puffy sleeves? Who holds a decapitated head? 78 00:08:19,620 --> 00:08:27,270 A little ghoulish. You can see it here in a bleeding bowl. She's as much a woman as she is a monster. 79 00:08:27,270 --> 00:08:31,320 And so she really belongs to a slightly different category of figure into a secondary 80 00:08:31,320 --> 00:08:36,600 but related layer of meaning on these maps about dangers in distant places. 81 00:08:36,600 --> 00:08:44,850 No one curried financial favour with potential patrons to go nose to nose with the dog head of cannibal and address. 82 00:08:44,850 --> 00:08:49,440 She's instead a picture of peril that makes other sites seem safe. 83 00:08:49,440 --> 00:08:58,840 By comparison. The women of Asia are concentrated in Java and Sumatra, where nine of them are pictured. 84 00:08:58,840 --> 00:09:04,460 And the imagery oscillates between the alluring and the alien, the tender and the terrifying. 85 00:09:04,460 --> 00:09:08,030 They run the gamut from a very demure figure with crossed legs. 86 00:09:08,030 --> 00:09:13,390 And you can see here she's listening to her companion. She's got a child in her arms. 87 00:09:13,390 --> 00:09:20,560 To a cannibal hanging, hacking up dinner. And I think that there's some real ambivalence about this region on the maps. 88 00:09:20,560 --> 00:09:26,200 It was not well-known of French explorers had died on a region to Sumatra and fifteen, twenty nine, 89 00:09:26,200 --> 00:09:35,350 which translated into knowledge of but apprehension about expeditions to this region, at least as far as we can see on the maps, Sumatra was known. 90 00:09:35,350 --> 00:09:42,280 But much of Asia was still unexplored. So the messages sent by the illustration on the maps affirms this uncertainty. 91 00:09:42,280 --> 00:09:50,710 Most of the women that appear are dressed and domestic. But dangers lurk with cleavers and puffy sleeves. 92 00:09:50,710 --> 00:09:55,120 There are eight women on maps of Canada on the showing you one example here. 93 00:09:55,120 --> 00:10:01,030 But their number includes some Europeans, perhaps the unsuccessful colonists who settled in the vicinity of what was 94 00:10:01,030 --> 00:10:06,010 later to become Quebec City in fifteen forty one and fled the following year. 95 00:10:06,010 --> 00:10:10,950 Victims of the hostility of the indigenous population and also of the climate. 96 00:10:10,950 --> 00:10:15,360 There's little evidence of these dangers on maps. There are some figures with bows and arrows. 97 00:10:15,360 --> 00:10:22,710 They're here, but they're not pointed at the French. They're instead pointed at big game, primarily deer. 98 00:10:22,710 --> 00:10:33,210 And the the French stand in close, uncomfortable proximity to these folks here who are dressed in animal skins, that may be a reminder of the climate. 99 00:10:33,210 --> 00:10:36,870 The women of these images of Canada domesticate the wild landscape. 100 00:10:36,870 --> 00:10:42,600 The European women and their fine clothes gather safely in the foreground of the group and seem protected by it. 101 00:10:42,600 --> 00:10:46,620 The indigenous women are neither threatening, armed nor scantily clad. 102 00:10:46,620 --> 00:10:53,100 In fact, their fur garments seem to advertise the abundance of resources that were so appealing to the French. 103 00:10:53,100 --> 00:11:00,300 Both the indigenous and European women on the maps of Canada served to highlight the ease of access to the riches of the land, 104 00:11:00,300 --> 00:11:09,530 which was exactly the message the French crown wanted to hear. The maps of South America and particularly of Brazil, there are 13 women. 105 00:11:09,530 --> 00:11:15,970 The largest concentration of any location. Women on maps of Brazil are shown with parents. 106 00:11:15,970 --> 00:11:24,960 The prise trophies of the Amazon. And amongst men, Halling di Wood, which was valued by French divers for its red pigment. 107 00:11:24,960 --> 00:11:31,650 But beyond this association with commodities, women in Brazil are dotted through the landscape in regular intervals. 108 00:11:31,650 --> 00:11:37,680 There are some here, for example, and there are others elsewhere. 109 00:11:37,680 --> 00:11:43,410 There are some that sit here. And then again, another woman here. 110 00:11:43,410 --> 00:11:54,770 And so and so forth. They there they are kind of distributed amongst the vignettes of violence. 111 00:11:54,770 --> 00:12:03,710 So unlike Cabot's women who here are armed and assailing Europeans. 112 00:12:03,710 --> 00:12:09,380 The women of Brazil on French maps are nude and unarmed, like the indigenous women in Canada. 113 00:12:09,380 --> 00:12:18,570 The women of Brazil serve to subdue potential threats and make the people and the place seem more tractable and more receptive to the French. 114 00:12:18,570 --> 00:12:25,070 The nude females in Brazil or figuration of desire on these maps, not necessarily for the women themselves. 115 00:12:25,070 --> 00:12:31,870 The large scale nudes in the foreground of the Ballade Atlas map of Brazil, for example. 116 00:12:31,870 --> 00:12:38,860 Attract viewers gaze, which is then directed towards the commercial opportunities that are depicted behind them. 117 00:12:38,860 --> 00:12:43,360 The desire inscribed here is for the commodities that can be exploited from 118 00:12:43,360 --> 00:12:48,130 the territorial body rather than for the bodies of the territory themselves. 119 00:12:48,130 --> 00:12:56,650 While that point might be implicit in other images here, the juxtaposition of the nudes and the resources make that connexion quite explicit. 120 00:12:56,650 --> 00:13:02,290 So there are a total of about 30 women on eight maps compared to hundreds of men. 121 00:13:02,290 --> 00:13:07,180 What can this gender imbalance in distribution tell us? Well, actually, quite a lot. 122 00:13:07,180 --> 00:13:14,110 Brazil, Canada and Sumatra were all places that had been visited by French navigators and where the French had firsthand knowledge, 123 00:13:14,110 --> 00:13:23,140 where they sought economic opportunities. The presence of the female figures defined me, defines these destinations as desirable and vulnerable. 124 00:13:23,140 --> 00:13:30,580 The women offer opportunity, invitation and appeal. Aligning sexual conquest with territorial possession. 125 00:13:30,580 --> 00:13:34,630 So let's go back to Europe and Africa, where the women are scarce. 126 00:13:34,630 --> 00:13:40,180 Maps of Europe had no female figures because there were no openings for commercial opportunities there, 127 00:13:40,180 --> 00:13:44,680 except perhaps as a result of French treaties with the Ottomans and the eastern Mediterranean. 128 00:13:44,680 --> 00:13:51,460 And it's there that we see a single female figure amongst a few turbaned men. 129 00:13:51,460 --> 00:13:55,710 The maps of Europe otherwise figure established male networks of power before Elizabeth, 130 00:13:55,710 --> 00:14:00,120 the first rain in England and Catherine Timidities Regency in France. 131 00:14:00,120 --> 00:14:04,260 The French may have hold may have hoped to gain a foothold in Italy, 132 00:14:04,260 --> 00:14:07,710 but such a military enterprise was not one sought or supported by the Nauman 133 00:14:07,710 --> 00:14:12,240 privateers who hope to solicit support for commercial expeditions across the globe. 134 00:14:12,240 --> 00:14:21,720 Europe was not for the purposes of these maps. A maritime opportunity to be conquered or exploited for different reasons was Africa French. 135 00:14:21,720 --> 00:14:29,720 So sailors on expedition to Sumatra had had a murderous encounter in Madagascar in fifteen twenty nine, 136 00:14:29,720 --> 00:14:35,130 and there doesn't appear to have been much further interest in developing commercial networks there. 137 00:14:35,130 --> 00:14:42,820 Africa is depicted as a place of danger, primarily in the form of exotic fauna, including elephants, crocodiles and rhinoceros. 138 00:14:42,820 --> 00:14:49,590 And home to many of the monstrous races described by ancient authors like that dog had and still believed to inhabit the continent. 139 00:14:49,590 --> 00:14:53,880 The well hidden women in Africa and there's one here and another one here. 140 00:14:53,880 --> 00:15:07,560 I've got a better detail of her over here. There are another means of expressing French uncertainty about the ease of conquest of this continent. 141 00:15:07,560 --> 00:15:15,570 Finally, I want to return to the format of the maps and the fact that there are more women on the maps in book form than on the large sheet maps. 142 00:15:15,570 --> 00:15:20,460 These formats are closely related, and I don't want to draw too significant a distinction between them. 143 00:15:20,460 --> 00:15:26,160 But to consult the sheet maps involves rolling them out on a flat surface and hunching over them. 144 00:15:26,160 --> 00:15:30,240 It's not particularly comfortable, as anybody who's consulted one in a library today can tell you, 145 00:15:30,240 --> 00:15:35,970 whereas holding the books in hand is much more comfortable than to let you do that in a modern library. 146 00:15:35,970 --> 00:15:44,170 And it's also more intimate. So the maps and books can be viewed at closer proximity and in a broader variety of spaces than the large sheet maps, 147 00:15:44,170 --> 00:15:52,880 which can sometimes be difficult to view. So the greater number of female figures in maps in book form may have been a further attempt 148 00:15:52,880 --> 00:15:58,880 to capitalise on the private consultation and intimate grasp of the viewer in all formats. 149 00:15:58,880 --> 00:16:04,760 However, the female figures on French manuscript maps were carefully deployed to seduce the eye, 150 00:16:04,760 --> 00:16:16,560 the interest and the investment of the powerful potential patrons to whose appetites they appealed. 151 00:16:16,560 --> 00:16:22,620 Thank you very much, Camille. What a terrific start to proceedings. 152 00:16:22,620 --> 00:16:28,800 As we'll be progressing through the day, once the speaker is spoken, then we'll take questions straight after that. 153 00:16:28,800 --> 00:16:41,070 So if I may, Kamale, I love the line that scarcity signals their significance, which I think was quite appropriate to what you had to say. 154 00:16:41,070 --> 00:16:46,070 I think my question is, what evidence do we have? 155 00:16:46,070 --> 00:16:54,280 On how the presence of women influence the maps uses to actually understand the maps. 156 00:16:54,280 --> 00:17:03,790 Such a good question. You know, I think the French are pretty ineffective ultimately in their in their explorations of the world. 157 00:17:03,790 --> 00:17:08,680 But they did. I mean, they did make an effort. Right. They did eventually get to Brazil. 158 00:17:08,680 --> 00:17:16,060 They did. It wasn't a particularly successful thing. Did the did the women attract them to these locations? 159 00:17:16,060 --> 00:17:22,840 I mean, I think that that's part of what's going on with the with the inclusion of the women on the maps. 160 00:17:22,840 --> 00:17:27,430 Was it. Was it a particularly successful ploy? I'm not entirely convinced that it was. 161 00:17:27,430 --> 00:17:32,310 But in terms of the decoration, I think that was the goal. Thank you very much. 162 00:17:32,310 --> 00:17:38,820 Another comment which we've had from the audience is that your map of the Adriatic seems to cover quite a lot of the Aegean as well. 163 00:17:38,820 --> 00:17:46,650 Do you have a view on that? It's as I was speaking, I realised I was mistaking it's really it's really the Aegean rather than the Adriatic. 164 00:17:46,650 --> 00:17:56,820 And I apologise for the error. So what was it that drove you to follow this line of investigation? 165 00:17:56,820 --> 00:18:07,980 It's also a good question. Someone else was observed that there seemed to be very few women on these maps. 166 00:18:07,980 --> 00:18:13,890 In fact, I was reading the work of a colleague. I steam greatly and I won't reveal who it was. 167 00:18:13,890 --> 00:18:17,410 And and the remark in the text was, there are no women on the maps at all. 168 00:18:17,410 --> 00:18:23,190 And I thought. Can I have missed that? Is it possible that there are no women on the maps at all? 169 00:18:23,190 --> 00:18:30,420 And so I didn't inventory and and at first I was really alarmed by how few women there were. 170 00:18:30,420 --> 00:18:39,390 And then as I started to build that my database and look at how many more women there were in other media and other in other print, 171 00:18:39,390 --> 00:18:47,070 particularly printed forms, I realised that there is this kind of paradoxical number of women in these French maps. 172 00:18:47,070 --> 00:18:52,150 It seems very, very small. When you go page to page or all over the surface. 173 00:18:52,150 --> 00:18:56,010 But then by contrast, other examples there, they're actually quite abundant. 174 00:18:56,010 --> 00:19:07,670 So was that was a kind of something that was something that emerged in in in my research that sparked a bit of a hunt. 175 00:19:07,670 --> 00:19:11,450 Also really fascinating on so moving on. 176 00:19:11,450 --> 00:19:20,580 Can you see a similar imbalance or rhetoric of woman and imperial potential in the 16th century French imagery? 177 00:19:20,580 --> 00:19:26,430 I've been thinking about this and, you know, one of the. 178 00:19:26,430 --> 00:19:31,950 One of the places we often find female figures is in the margins, 179 00:19:31,950 --> 00:19:39,840 the way Manuscript's in particular decorated in the margins are lots of reclining female figures. 180 00:19:39,840 --> 00:19:50,850 And I think that they there is there is a kind of connexion between the exotic and the beautiful and the desirable. 181 00:19:50,850 --> 00:19:55,500 And that does frame other kinds of Amadeu imagery as well as the cartographic. 182 00:19:55,500 --> 00:20:03,130 Absolutely. Right. And I think a final question for this section, KAMALE is some. 183 00:20:03,130 --> 00:20:09,600 Have you looked at Arab stroke, Islamic marks in your research? 184 00:20:09,600 --> 00:20:15,300 Only a little. I'd love to look into them more deeply. 185 00:20:15,300 --> 00:20:20,210 I don't have strong linguistic skills in that area. 186 00:20:20,210 --> 00:20:31,140 And and so that's been a bit daunting. But I'm I'm very curious about the relationships between different different mapmakers across 187 00:20:31,140 --> 00:20:35,400 the world and how they how they exchanged ideas and what they saw in each other's work. 188 00:20:35,400 --> 00:20:39,560 So that's, I think, is something that would be very interesting to look at. Definitely. 189 00:20:39,560 --> 00:20:47,880 I know the question is just come in and it has an overlap between your paper on what Chet's going to say, I'm sure. 190 00:20:47,880 --> 00:20:57,060 Women are often used to designate continents in later centuries. Might this evolve from these maps? 191 00:20:57,060 --> 00:21:05,120 It. It's possible, although I'm reluctant to say that anything evolves from these maps because their manuscript. 192 00:21:05,120 --> 00:21:10,120 And so they're consulted in by a very small number of people. 193 00:21:10,120 --> 00:21:14,870 They don't. They don't, for the most part, get copied into print. 194 00:21:14,870 --> 00:21:24,860 In fact, what we see with the French cardiograph tradition is that the manuscript is copied from print rather than in the opposite direction. 195 00:21:24,860 --> 00:21:32,150 So they're not terribly influential. They're useful. And in this small coterie of courtiers. 196 00:21:32,150 --> 00:21:37,370 But I don't think that they that they ultimately expand far beyond that, 197 00:21:37,370 --> 00:21:43,430 although Chet is going to talk to us about women as as the personification of continents. 198 00:21:43,430 --> 00:21:47,840 And that's a subject that's become the focus of a lot of research. 199 00:21:47,840 --> 00:21:57,015 And so I think somebody else probably knows the answer to that question better than I do. Excavator plus terrific Ancef.