| Postdoctoral Research Fellow | |
| Herkunftsinstitution: | University of Oxford |
| Zeit am Institut: | 2026 |
| Förderung: | IEG Stipendium |
| Forschungsthema: | Cartography for the Commons: Economics, Resources, and Environment in Everyday Early Modern Maps |
| "In the early modern world, cartography and mapping swiftly became an art as people around the world sought to put their world to paper. World maps recorded the first circumnavigations of the Earth, charting trade routes and economic expansions in search of resources while providing a visual record of colonial attitudes and ideations. However, these were maps for the upper strata, rather than the common people. To discover the maps for the common people, we must look deeper, into the records created for them. For example, in local legal records we sometimes find hand drawn maps created by scribes and community officials, which delineated boundaries and proved who had the right to access and trade specific resources. Unlike the professionally drawn maps created by cartographers, these maps illustrate the resources and landscape features that were important to everyday life in early modern Germany, and how space was valued and divided. This project asks what these maps tell us about the everyday economics and interactions with the environment, a vital question to help us understand the place of common people in the early modern world, both natural and human constructed. This research will consist of GIS databasing and boots-on-the-ground research of the landscapes of early modern Germany depicted in these maps, centred on a case study of the Rhineland Pfalz region." |
(c) Aaron Larsen
