From medieval Beatine maps and Genoese nautical charts to ...

The North Carolina Colloquium
in Medieval and Early Modern Studies
Mapping Medieval and Early Modern Worlds
February 20-21, 2009

The tenth annual North Carolina Colloquium in Medieval and Early Modern Studies, a
graduate student conference jointly sponsored by Duke University and the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, will explore the ways that medieval and early modern individuals and
societies mapped, visualized, and conceived of their world in terms of its various spaces. The
conference will focus on mapping as a symbolic and physical means through which individual,
communal, religious, and cultural encounters were defined. Medieval and early modern mapping
takes a variety of conceptual and physical forms: through literary genres such as allegory, travel
narratives, and conduct guides, architectural plans and artistic representations, and developing
scientific knowledge. The conference also seeks to address how contemporary discourses across
disciplines have treated these spaces – conceptual, communal, religious, private, geographical –
and their resulting illuminations or misconceptions.
From medieval Beatine maps and Genoese nautical charts to Waldseemuller’s 1507
world map, the physical activity of mapping participated in the translation and transcription of
cultural, historical, political, religious, and imaginary encounters. In their articulation of these
relationships, maps combined burgeoning scientific and geographical knowledge with a
developing system of visual representation. Through literary texts, architecture, historical
records, scientific development, and religious narratives, individuals and communities sought to
negotiate similar questions of space and representation. Investigating medieval and early modern
practices of symbolic, social, and geographic mapping acknowledges the complexity and
difficulty of these cultural interactions, both real and imagined. Our conference is also interested
in exploring the division often made between medieval and early modern conceptions of their
spaces and world. Humanism, its corresponding secularism, and Protestantism are often credited

with a remapping of civic, artistic and literary space. The North Carolina Colloquium in
Medieval and Early Modern Studies is equally committed to both periods; papers could address
either one or both.
We invite papers dealing with various conceptions and practices of mapping space and
with the real or perceived changes that occurred between medieval and early modern practices.
Paper topics might investigate this theme through a variety of disciplinary lenses, not limited to
the following suggestions:
Mapping as a reflection of cultural encounters
Ways of symbolic mapping, such as allegory
Mapping social relations through conduct guides
Artistic representations (of the New World, Ottoman Empire, etc)
Technological developments and textual dissemination
Travel narratives
Biblical interpretation and its relationship to religious and political encounters
The mapping of medieval and early modern spaces
Empire building and exploration
Medieval and early modern systems of visual representation
Biology and the mapping of the human body
The function of material objects as forms of mapping
The mapping of spiritual realms
The framework of literary space

Graduate students from various disciplines are encouraged to submit a 250 word abstract by
January 5, 2009. Submit abstracts as an attachment to Layla Aldousany at
aldousany@gmail.com. The program committee will announce the program in early January.