Event Report: Learning from Early Modern Books, London Renaissance Seminar, Friday June 7

Event Report: Learning from Early Modern Books, London Renaissance Seminar, Friday June 7

by Centre for Early Modern Studies

The London Renaissance Seminar held a 1 day symposium, “Learning from Early Modern Books,” on June 7 at Birkbeck, jointly organised by Associate Professor Trisha Pender and Professor Susan Wiseman. The symposium brought together three large team projects in early modern studies: the ARC-funded Transforming the Early Modern Archive and Marginalia and the Early Modern Woman Writer (led by Ros Smith), and the Leverhulme-funded Written Worlds (led by Sue Wiseman). CEMS members Hannah Upton, Julia Rodwell and Ros Smith gave papers in one of the 5 sessions, and Professor Adam Smyth ended the day with a brilliant keynote based on research for his new book, The Book Makers. We were delighted that members of John Emmerson’s family, David, Chloe and James Emmerson, were able to attend the event and to hear research based on the Emmerson collection at State Library Victoria by Anna Welch and Paul Salzman.

Historian of cartography Chet Van Duzer will host this CEMS workshop on studying early modern maps slowly.

When: Tuesday 14 October, 2025

Where: ANU Campus (location TBA)

Regstration: Registrations open soon

Abstract

Maps are incredibly rich documents that only reveal some of their secrets after slow and deliberate study, and it is precisely this aspect of maps that we will explore in this two-hour workshop. Chet Van Duzer will analyze several early modern maps and provide examples of important characteristics of them that can only be appreciated and understood through slow looking. He will also supply advice on how to study maps slowly, and workshop participants will consult historic maps to begin to practice looking slowly at them, with plenty of time for examining the maps together and asking questions. The goal of the workshop is that participants will gain experience and tools for engaging more fully with maps in the future.

About the Speaker

Chet Van Duzer is a historian of cartography and a board member of the Lazarus Project at the University of Rochester, which brings multispectral imaging (a technology for recovering information from damaged manuscripts) to cultural institutions around the world. He has published extensively on medieval and Renaissance maps; his recent books include Henricus Martellus’s World Map at Yale (c. 1491): Multispectral Imaging, Sources, and Influence, published by Springer in 2019, and Martin Waldseemüller’s Carta marina of 1516: Study and Transcription of the Long Legends, published by Springer in 2020. His book Frames that Speak: Cartouches on Early Modern Maps was published by Brill in Open Access in 2023. His current projects are books about self-portraits by cartographers that appear on maps and the historical cartography of the Indian Ocean.