Cartography in Central Europe: the Iconisation of Rule

A prerequisite for understanding the function and significance of territorial maps (of the individual hereditary lands, of Hungary, of Bohemia or of Moravia) as a medium is knowledge of the respective agents who commissioned these undertakings – as addressors combining certain interests with the medium’s publication and distribution: commissions usually came from the sovereign, the rural estates or the city government, but they could also come from international publishers primarily interested in the sale of such maps. Precisely determining who commissioned a map offers considerable potential for its historical study as a medium of communication: what specific interest did they have in the map’s production and distribution and how is this interest manifested on the map?

The aim is to develop a basis for a history of imagery and rule in the rural and urban maps of the Habsburg lands in the period under investigation.
On 5 and 6 October 2017, the OeAW hosted an international workshop on the subject of  “Carthography in Early Modern Central Europe (Space – Hegemony – Methods)”.

In 2017/18, a project co-financed by the City of Vienna examined Central European rural and urban maps with a focus on Vienna in the Early Modern period, investigating the holdings of the map collection of the Austrian National Library, the Woldan Collection at the OeAW, the Wien Museum, the Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv and the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv.

Preparations are underway for a further workshop on the subject of “Charting Rule. Textual-Visual Representations of the Habsburg Lands in the Age of Humanism”, scheduled to take place in Vienna in January 2021, in cooperation with Martina Strecken of the Department of History/ZHM at the University of Zurich.