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  • In 1675, John Ogilby produced his road atlas with strip maps which not only arrived with fanfare, but spawned several more publications that aimed to be user-friendly. As with many maps and atlases from the London printing trade, the objectives were to serve consumers, acquire a piece of the market, and have an outlet for a new edition. Across the Channel, however, the road network of France, as with other public works, was not only state-directed but a tool of state power. Not until nearly one hundred years later did Claude-Sidoine Michel and Louis-Charles Desnos produce L'Indicateur Fidele, which provided strip maps for merchants, navigators, and travelers. This publication emerged out of the French national mapping project directed by the Cassini family. In the interim, while French map makers produced maps with an appeal to serving the state, they, like their London contemporaries, also hoped to maintain a thriving business and attract an audience, often through the traditional French social institution of patronage. The purpose of this comparative study of (post) road maps and atlases of England and France is to investigate the role of the government and the publishing trade in the production of these works. © 2016 University of Toronto Press.

  • Images of allegorical women have often appeared on maps or in atlas frontispieces as objects in need of security provided by male protectors or as the counterpoint, objects to be dominated by male possessors. Exploring the role of women in the early modern map trade initially reveals not only a similar male dominance but also similar calls for protection. Nearly 10 years ago, Alice Hudson and Mary McMichael Ritzlin produced a checklist of about 300 pre-twentieth-century women in cartography. The present work contributes to the further investigation of some of these women in the early modern map trade and studies in the allied field of book printing, and more general works on women in commercial trade provide the framework for this piece. Women in the map trade were quite cognizant of the challenges of their gender and used a feminine discourse-that is, they played the feminine card-when it served their interests. All of these women, however, participated in the male discourse of the corporate community, which entailed not only making contracts and partnerships and advertising and producing new works but also making use of the social network within the trade, as well as exploiting the patronage connections cultivated by their husbands before them.

  • Using the printed works of two French cartographers, Alexis-Hubert Jaillot and Guillaume Delisle, I investigate how the changing interests of the government directed not only the process of map-making but the rhetoric evident in printed maps and atlases. Jaillot, a commercial map publisher flourishing during the second half of the seventeenth century, produced maps that participated in the fabrication of the image of Louis XIV. Maps served this "cult of image" and contributed to a multimedia show to glorify the reign of the Sun King and to support his personal state - l'état, c'est moi. In the eighteenth century, while a rhetoric of image was still present on printed maps, the "cult of image" was dead and mapping appealed to the rise of the impersonal or bureaucratized state - l'état, c'est l'état. Delisle produced maps as instruments of statecraft that aided the state in furthering its domestic and international interests. In particular, printed maps of the Americas served the government's need to acquire greater territorial control. While images were still powerful on New World maps, the French boundary claims, egregious to some, if uncontested could be produced time and again as a true representation and legitimization of territorial control.

Last update from database: 3/13/26, 4:15 PM (UTC)

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