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  • 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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