Thank you, Nick, and thank you, Nick and Liz and everyone at the Bodleian for organising this wonderful conference.
My focus today is a small group of world maps produced in Renaissance Normandy, sometimes identified as the D.F. School of Cartography.
Only 20 maps survived from the 16th century, and of these, only 10 are decorated with human figures.
Eight of these days, between 15, 42 and 15.
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.
All of the maps are hand painted on parchment or vellum for our large charts.
That would have been consulted on a table before Rebounders books.
Although the maps were based on Iberian or Italian charts used for navigation.
These French examples were intended for connoisseurs and libraries rather than port by pilots on shipboard.
Since the charts in which they were based were somewhat out of date,
they French manuscript maps are more aesthetically delightful than they are geographically accurate.
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.
Although the production circumstances of these maps remains somewhat obscure.
Scholars believe that Norman Privateers used the maps as gifts to court the Crown support and sustenance of transatlantic exploration and enterprise.
So these maps appear to have served to invite investment and they naturally saw.
Therefore, to show the commercial opportunities that were their subject and the best and safest light to maximise benefits and minimise risk.
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.
Manuscript maps were objects of prestige and were decorated by painters.
As you can see here in this example.
Who relied sometimes on motifs from printed maps and also on descriptions from textual sources and firsthand accounts of French sailors.
I believe a case can be made that despite the occasional reuse of printed motifs,
these maps do constitute a cartographic form that was distinctly French for it made for a distinctly French audience.
They differ from other European examples because despite the relative scarcity of women on these sumptuous manuscript maps,
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.
Most printed examples have no human figures at all, and those that do have only a handful of women.
For example, Mountain Vaults Emulous fifteen sixteen Khartum Rina has one in India,
and Lawrence Freese's slightly later reissue of the same map adds another in the island of Java.
Sebastian Cabot's fifteen forty four map has five.
The woman in India, one in North and one in South America and one on the edge of the world in Northern Asia.
After about fifteen fifty five more women and more human figures generally are to be found on all kinds of maps.
But earlier examples only rarely include them.
Textual sources, like travel accounts written in France and elsewhere, mentioned women in abundant detail.
French authors like Shiell Penalty, Jack Kelty and Andre to the all include more women in their writings than are documented on these maps.
So that further suggests a particular purpose for these manuscript maps,
since they diverge both from the textual and from the visual precedents and circulation at the time.
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?
And also, why are there so many women in comparison to their numbers on printed maps?
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.
I should add that generally speaking, it's not difficult to distinguish men from women on these maps.
But there are also some figures of utter ambiguity, and sometimes it's only possible to hazard a guess.
So these are the necessary caveats and focussing on a very narrow time period.
My sample size is small since just a few maps survive.
There aren't many women on such maps as do survive, making inference about their role difficult.
And sometimes when there are female figures, they can be difficult to detect.
These limits naturally raise the question of why we should bother to investigate them at all.
The answer is that our knowledge of these maps is so fragmentary that any effort that helps to decipher their
contents and purposes can help us to better understand them and their place in the history of cartography.
So where are the women? Amongst the scores of sea creatures, clusters of cannibals and multiple monstrous races on French world maps.
The place of women is often minimal and marginal. Here are the four big sheet maps with the female figures circled.
Although these large charts are not the earliest examples, they make it easy to see the distribution of female figures.
A distribution that holds for the bound volumes, there are slightly more women in the maps bound books.
And that's a detail to which I'll return.
Unlike the male figures, which are more or less evenly distributed across the continents, the females are deployed strategically and selectively.
So although we might be inclined to see the rarity of women as evidence of their insignificance in French renaissance cartography,
I think the opposite is true. There's scarcity signals their significance.
The men on maps are many. [INAUDIBLE] and working, writing and ruling, they are dressed in robes and cloak.
Sometimes they hold swords, spears or sceptres. By contrast, women are few.
Mostly mothering their nude or clad in garments that we'd recognise as dresses.
You can see one here, for example. They wield neither spears nor swords.
Instead, they hold children by the hand or in their arms.
They listen while men talk. Sometimes they just stimulate in conversation with men who are about to be bludgeoned to death here.
On occasion, they butcher human figures and sometimes they cook human limbs on fires.
Thus, the depictions of women. On French maps largely confirmed what was already suspected about the lands across the sea.
They were intriguing and enticing and also strange and dangerous.
So let's take a closer look. Starting with the maps of Europe.
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.
We will return. Amongst the eight maps where eight groups of maps, I've only found a few well hidden women in Africa.
And I'll come back to them, too. In Asia, there are quite a few women.
Here are just a few examples. These women are in. There are few women here in the Caucasus.
This is an atlas that has a page that describes this region and says that there are mountain Jews.
There are Jews who are enclosed by mountains. And there's a woman amongst them. And then there are women in India.
There are women in in other regions in the far reaches of Southeast Asia.
A female figure has the head of a dog. She belongs to the race of the sign, a safley here.
The dog headed people who were first described in antiquity,
and they make frequent appearances on maps throughout the Middle Ages and into the age of print.
Both also Müller and Freeze depict cannibals here, but only on the French map.
Do we see this bipedal dog in a dress with puffy sleeves? Who holds a decapitated head?
A little ghoulish. You can see it here in a bleeding bowl. She's as much a woman as she is a monster.
And so she really belongs to a slightly different category of figure into a secondary
but related layer of meaning on these maps about dangers in distant places.
No one curried financial favour with potential patrons to go nose to nose with the dog head of cannibal and address.
She's instead a picture of peril that makes other sites seem safe.
By comparison. The women of Asia are concentrated in Java and Sumatra, where nine of them are pictured.
And the imagery oscillates between the alluring and the alien, the tender and the terrifying.
They run the gamut from a very demure figure with crossed legs.
And you can see here she's listening to her companion. She's got a child in her arms.
To a cannibal hanging, hacking up dinner. And I think that there's some real ambivalence about this region on the maps.
It was not well-known of French explorers had died on a region to Sumatra and fifteen, twenty nine,
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.
But much of Asia was still unexplored. So the messages sent by the illustration on the maps affirms this uncertainty.
Most of the women that appear are dressed and domestic. But dangers lurk with cleavers and puffy sleeves.
There are eight women on maps of Canada on the showing you one example here.
But their number includes some Europeans, perhaps the unsuccessful colonists who settled in the vicinity of what was
later to become Quebec City in fifteen forty one and fled the following year.
Victims of the hostility of the indigenous population and also of the climate.
There's little evidence of these dangers on maps. There are some figures with bows and arrows.
They're here, but they're not pointed at the French. They're instead pointed at big game, primarily deer.
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.
The women of these images of Canada domesticate the wild landscape.
The European women and their fine clothes gather safely in the foreground of the group and seem protected by it.
The indigenous women are neither threatening, armed nor scantily clad.
In fact, their fur garments seem to advertise the abundance of resources that were so appealing to the French.
Both the indigenous and European women on the maps of Canada served to highlight the ease of access to the riches of the land,
which was exactly the message the French crown wanted to hear. The maps of South America and particularly of Brazil, there are 13 women.
The largest concentration of any location. Women on maps of Brazil are shown with parents.
The prise trophies of the Amazon. And amongst men, Halling di Wood, which was valued by French divers for its red pigment.
But beyond this association with commodities, women in Brazil are dotted through the landscape in regular intervals.
There are some here, for example, and there are others elsewhere.
There are some that sit here. And then again, another woman here.
And so and so forth. They there they are kind of distributed amongst the vignettes of violence.
So unlike Cabot's women who here are armed and assailing Europeans.
The women of Brazil on French maps are nude and unarmed, like the indigenous women in Canada.
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.
The nude females in Brazil or figuration of desire on these maps, not necessarily for the women themselves.
The large scale nudes in the foreground of the Ballade Atlas map of Brazil, for example.
Attract viewers gaze, which is then directed towards the commercial opportunities that are depicted behind them.
The desire inscribed here is for the commodities that can be exploited from
the territorial body rather than for the bodies of the territory themselves.
While that point might be implicit in other images here, the juxtaposition of the nudes and the resources make that connexion quite explicit.
So there are a total of about 30 women on eight maps compared to hundreds of men.
What can this gender imbalance in distribution tell us? Well, actually, quite a lot.
Brazil, Canada and Sumatra were all places that had been visited by French navigators and where the French had firsthand knowledge,
where they sought economic opportunities. The presence of the female figures defined me, defines these destinations as desirable and vulnerable.
The women offer opportunity, invitation and appeal. Aligning sexual conquest with territorial possession.
So let's go back to Europe and Africa, where the women are scarce.
Maps of Europe had no female figures because there were no openings for commercial opportunities there,
except perhaps as a result of French treaties with the Ottomans and the eastern Mediterranean.
And it's there that we see a single female figure amongst a few turbaned men.
The maps of Europe otherwise figure established male networks of power before Elizabeth,
the first rain in England and Catherine Timidities Regency in France.
The French may have hold may have hoped to gain a foothold in Italy,
but such a military enterprise was not one sought or supported by the Nauman
privateers who hope to solicit support for commercial expeditions across the globe.
Europe was not for the purposes of these maps. A maritime opportunity to be conquered or exploited for different reasons was Africa French.
So sailors on expedition to Sumatra had had a murderous encounter in Madagascar in fifteen twenty nine,
and there doesn't appear to have been much further interest in developing commercial networks there.
Africa is depicted as a place of danger, primarily in the form of exotic fauna, including elephants, crocodiles and rhinoceros.
And home to many of the monstrous races described by ancient authors like that dog had and still believed to inhabit the continent.
The well hidden women in Africa and there's one here and another one here.
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.
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.
These formats are closely related, and I don't want to draw too significant a distinction between them.
But to consult the sheet maps involves rolling them out on a flat surface and hunching over them.
It's not particularly comfortable, as anybody who's consulted one in a library today can tell you,
whereas holding the books in hand is much more comfortable than to let you do that in a modern library.
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,
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
to capitalise on the private consultation and intimate grasp of the viewer in all formats.
However, the female figures on French manuscript maps were carefully deployed to seduce the eye,
the interest and the investment of the powerful potential patrons to whose appetites they appealed.
Thank you very much, Camille. What a terrific start to proceedings.
As we'll be progressing through the day, once the speaker is spoken, then we'll take questions straight after that.
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.
I think my question is, what evidence do we have?
On how the presence of women influence the maps uses to actually understand the maps.
Such a good question. You know, I think the French are pretty ineffective ultimately in their in their explorations of the world.
But they did. I mean, they did make an effort. Right. They did eventually get to Brazil.
They did. It wasn't a particularly successful thing. Did the did the women attract them to these locations?
I mean, I think that that's part of what's going on with the with the inclusion of the women on the maps.
Was it. Was it a particularly successful ploy? I'm not entirely convinced that it was.
But in terms of the decoration, I think that was the goal. Thank you very much.
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.
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.
And I apologise for the error. So what was it that drove you to follow this line of investigation?
It's also a good question. Someone else was observed that there seemed to be very few women on these maps.
In fact, I was reading the work of a colleague. I steam greatly and I won't reveal who it was.
And and the remark in the text was, there are no women on the maps at all.
And I thought. Can I have missed that? Is it possible that there are no women on the maps at all?
And so I didn't inventory and and at first I was really alarmed by how few women there were.
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,
particularly printed forms, I realised that there is this kind of paradoxical number of women in these French maps.
It seems very, very small. When you go page to page or all over the surface.
But then by contrast, other examples there, they're actually quite abundant.
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.
Also really fascinating on so moving on.
Can you see a similar imbalance or rhetoric of woman and imperial potential in the 16th century French imagery?
I've been thinking about this and, you know, one of the.
One of the places we often find female figures is in the margins,
the way Manuscript's in particular decorated in the margins are lots of reclining female figures.
And I think that they there is there is a kind of connexion between the exotic and the beautiful and the desirable.
And that does frame other kinds of Amadeu imagery as well as the cartographic.
Absolutely. Right. And I think a final question for this section, KAMALE is some.
Have you looked at Arab stroke, Islamic marks in your research?
Only a little. I'd love to look into them more deeply.
I don't have strong linguistic skills in that area.
And and so that's been a bit daunting. But I'm I'm very curious about the relationships between different different mapmakers across
the world and how they how they exchanged ideas and what they saw in each other's work.
So that's, I think, is something that would be very interesting to look at. Definitely.
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.
Women are often used to designate continents in later centuries. Might this evolve from these maps?
It. It's possible, although I'm reluctant to say that anything evolves from these maps because their manuscript.
And so they're consulted in by a very small number of people.
They don't. They don't, for the most part, get copied into print.
In fact, what we see with the French cardiograph tradition is that the manuscript is copied from print rather than in the opposite direction.
So they're not terribly influential. They're useful. And in this small coterie of courtiers.
But I don't think that they that they ultimately expand far beyond that,
although Chet is going to talk to us about women as as the personification of continents.
And that's a subject that's become the focus of a lot of research.
And so I think somebody else probably knows the answer to that question better than I do. Excavator plus terrific Ancef.