A CMRS Ahmanson Conference
“Mapping Medieval Geographies:
Cartography and Geographical Thought in the Latin West and Beyond, 300-1600”
Thursday, May 28 – Saturday, May 30, 2009
Geography as it was understood and practiced in the Middle Ages, within both eastern and western traditions, and as represented both graphically and textually, is a subject of renewed interest and importance among historians, philologists and geographers.
This conference aims to promote an exchange between those of different disciplines working on geographical ideas and thinking from late Antiquity to the Renaissance on two themes:
“Translation, transmission, transculturation” will focus on the continuities in geographical knowledge from Antiquity into and through the Middle Ages; the complex transculturation of formal geographical and cartographic knowledge between Latin, Byzantine and Islamic scholars and travelers; and the copying and transmission of key geographical texts and sources, and their selection and adaptation.
“Mapping, imagining, placing” will consider questions of “scale, place, and the geographical imagination” looking at the changing distinctiveness, character and uses of “geography” in medieval thought; the intertextual nature of “medieval geography” between visual (cartographic) and textual descriptions, and connections between “thinking geographically” (i.e., spatial sensibility) and “geographical thinking” (i.e., writing and visualizing “geography”) in the Middle Ages.
This conference was organized by Dr. Keith D. Lilley (School of Geography, Archaeology & Palaeoecology, Queen’s University Belfast) and the late Professor Denis Cosgrove (Geography, UCLA). Support has been provided by a generous grant from The Ahmanson Foundation, with additional funding from the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the UCLA Vice Chancellor for Research, the Humanities Division of the UCLA College of Letters and Science, and the Historical Geography Research Group of the RGS-IBG.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
University of California, Los Angeles
Royce Hall 314
4:00 pm Registration and refreshments
4:45 Welcoming Remarks
Brian P. Copenhaver (UCLA)
Director, Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies
David L. Rigby (UCLA)
Chair, Department of Geography
Patrick Geary (UCLA)
Department of History
5:00 Keith Lilley (Queen’s University Belfast)
“Mapping Medieval Geographies”
5:30 Veronica Della Dora (University Bristol)
“Denis E. Cosgrove and Mapping Geography’s History”
6:00 Reception
7:00 Alessandro Scafi (The Warburg Institute, University of London)
“The Naked Philosophers: India and the Medieval Geography of Religion”
Friday, May 29, 2009
University of California, Los Angeles
Royce Hall 314
8:30 am Coffee, Tea, Pastries
Session 1. Geographical Traditions
Chair: Keith Lilley (Queen’s University Belfast)
9:00 Natalia Lozovsky (UC Berkeley)
The Uses of Classical History and Geography in Medieval St. Gall”
Medieval geography has attracted renewed attention in recent decades. New approaches and discoveries have radically changed the old story of decline and slavish reliance on authority. A new story gradually emerges, but we still need to fill in important pieces in order to understand how geographical knowledge developed in the Middle Ages. My case study of the relationship and uses of classical geography and history at the medieval abbey of St. Gall offers a step in this direction. St. Gall provides unique information for considering how scholars at an important center of learning approached geographical studies throughout the medieval period. The library of St. Gall has existed in the same place since its inception in the eighth century. It still preserves medieval catalogues of the library and the manuscripts themselves, including school books with annotations, copies of classical works, and local monastic chronicles. This rich material testifies to a great interest that St. Gall monks had in history and geography. What were the ways and institutional settings in which medieval scholars studied these subjects? What techniques did they use in order to understand classical texts written several hundred years earlier? What goals did they pursue beyond learning the language and mastering the information? Glosses and diagrams in manuscripts provide answers to these and other questions, revealing both traditional strategies and immediate reactions of the readers. Reflecting contemporary concerns, St. Gall materials show how medieval scholars used historical and geographical learning to understand their place within the physical world and human history.
9:45 Andrew Merrills (University of Leicester)
“Time, Space and the ‘Origines’ of Isidore of Seville”
The chapter will examine the historical dimension to Isidore’s geographical understanding. The sense of temporal depth in the Origines is implicit in its etymological methodology: Isidore’s insistence that only an appreciation of the aetiologies of the names of peoples, places and things could generate true understanding of God’s Creation led inevitably to innumerable historical and pseudo-historical digressions. But these digressions, and the sense of temporal depth that each represents, work differently in separate sections of the Origines, not least in the chapters of the work concerned with the physical world and its inhabitants. For linguistic reasons – discussed by Isidore in the opening section of Origines IX – Hebrew, Latin and (especially) Greek history enjoy particular prominence at different points of the work. As several commentators have remarked, the result may be regarded as a cartographic palimpsest, in which the more recent etymologies drawn from the Latin world are overlaid upon those of the Greek and Biblical past. But how did Isidore reconcile this fractured – and historical – etymological geography with the much-changed world which surrounded him? Over the previous three centuries, historians and geographers had done their best to reconcile the comforting authority of the classical texts with rapid spread of Christianity in the third and fourth centuries, or with the seismic political changes of the fifth and sixth. Isidore, it would seem, rejected this. What was the function of this ossified lexical geography? What impact did it have upon Isidore’s audience? And what does it imply about the author’s own ontology (particularly when contrasted with the geographical flexibility of his own History of the Goths)?
10:30 Break
10:45 Jesse Simon (University of Oxford)
“Chorography Reconsidered: Roman Mapping Traditions in Late Antiquity and Beyond”
In the opening lines of his famous Geographia, Ptolemy brings to our attention the practice of chorography, a lower form of geographical representation which should in no way be confused with geography itself. Chorography, he tells us, requires no particular skill and is more suited to a draughtsman or a painter than to an astronomer and mathematician. Ptolemy’s dismissive and somewhat limiting definition has cast its shadow over the bulk of modern scholarship on later Roman cartographical methods. In many ways, his assessment corresponds neatly with the accepted narrative of pragmatism and decline which is thought to have characterised the fate of sciences in the Roman world from the later imperial era onward. Our other sources, however, tell a very different story: instead of being an unsatisfactory derivative of Greek practices, chorography reveals itself to be a vibrant tradition which represents an approach to cartography that would not only continue throughout late antiquity but would go on to influence representations of physical space both in the Christian west and in the Islamic east. The paper I’m proposing aims to re-evaluate our late antique sources so that we may arrive at a new understanding of chorography and the forms it may have taken. It will then apply those definitions both to surviving artefacts and to literary evidence in order to demonstrate the continuity of this oft discounted Roman tradition, and to trace its progress into the medieval world.
11:30 Angelo Cattaneo (New University of Lisbon)
“Venice and Castille, 1430-1457. The Translation and Adaptation of Ptolemy’s Geography and Mid-Fifteenth Century Mapping”
My proposal addresses the topics of both the continuities in geographical knowledge from Antiquity through the Middle Ages, and the transmission of “key” geographical texts and sources and their selection and adaptation in the fifteenth century. My contribution will present the main results of research on two mid-fifteenth-century codices, for the first time fully transcribed, translated and analyzed: 1) A “forgotten” Venetian manuscript (Venice, Biblioteca Marciana, Ms. it. Cl. VI, 24, c.1430-50), written in Venetian dialect, the first known translation and adaptation of Ptolemy’s Geography into a vernacular, with 62 maps (2 circular planispheres, 30 cosmographical grids derived and “enlarged” from the classical Ptolemaic grids, and 30 regional maps); 2) The so-called ‘Genoese World Map’, drawn in 1457 and now held at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence, for which the full transcription of the legends and the toponyms has revealed this map as the only known example of a mappa mundi of Castilian origin. The first document contribute to observe the way in which in Venice Ptolemy’s work was combined with classical authors (Solinus, Caesar, Tacitus and Pliny) and Marco Polo to give shape to an unparalleled representation of the fifteenth-century imago mundi. At the same time, it shows the earliest theoretical and graphical attempts to extend Ptolemy’s projections to include the southern and northern of the globe, omitted by Ptolemy. Within a similar framework, the second document attests to how Ptolemy’s work was combined with Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae (for the depiction of Africa and the rich iconography of the map) and Poggio Bracciolini’s Book IV of the De varietate fortunae transmitting Niccolò de’ Conti’s Travel to India (for the representation of Asia) to the purpose of a better "modern" reconstruction of the world picture on an ecumenical scale. It is apparent that both documents attest to a circulation, transmission, and adaptation of Ptolemy’s Geography in ways that differ markedly from the better known circulation of the Geography in several other major European centers such as Florence, Rome, and Nuremberg.
12:15 Discussion
12:45 Lunch
Session 2. Geographical Imaginations
Chair: Veronica Della Dora (University of Bristol)
1:45 Amanda Power (University of Sheffield)
“The Cosmographical Imagination of Roger Bacon”
Writing in c.1266, Roger Bacon struggled to synthesise a multitude of geographical and cosmographical ideas: recently-transmitted Greek and Arabic natural philosophy and mathematics; classical and biblical orthodoxies; recent travel reports from envoys and missionaries among the Mongols; apocalyptic expectations and an impatient universalist sense of the Franciscan mission. The ambitious accompanying map is not extant, although his description of it is. A major point of interest is his attempt to use modified astrological and environmental determinism derived from translated Arabic texts in order to provide empirical information about the world within a Christian, evangelical and eschatological context. His Opus maius offered Pope Clement IV a richly-imagined and urgent vision of what Latin knowledge of the world might be, given the right lines of investigation and the legitimisation of controversial methodologies and ideas. Through Bacon’s work, this paper explores the dynamism and awkwardness of the Latin response to competing and problematic sources of information.
2:30 Nessa Cronin (National University of Ireland, Galway)
“‘Blistered toes’ and the Eye of History: Continuity and Change in the Cartographic Narratives of Giraldus Cambrensis”
This paper examines the cartographic narratives (oral, textual, visual) of Giraldus Cambrensis’ work on late twelfth-century Ireland. With an analysis of two key maps, the first being the map of Europe (NLI MS 700 f.48r) embedded within the Cambrensis codex at the National Library of Ireland and the second being an Ortelian copy of ‘Eryn’ c.1581 (BL Sloane 2200 f.13), the paper will trace the cartographic typologies of Anglo-Norman views of Ireland from the medieval to the early modern periods. Following work in contemporary cultural geography, is argued that maps, and the particular knowledges that they purport to represent and in turn create, operate in a self-reflexive manner with the mapmaking society that both patronises, produces and consumes such images. The paper will open with a discussion as to the nature of cartographic typologies in a nascent colonial context by examining the sites of production and modes of transmission of Cambrensis’ cartographic ‘knowledge’ of Ireland in relation to medieval Europe. Finally, the issue of cultural translation (with the relationships between land, landscape and language, and oral, manuscript and textual cultures) will be explored in relation to the early modern concept of geography as the oculus historiae, the eye of history.
3:15 Break
3:30 Marcia Kupfer (Ohio State University)
“‘Location, location, location!’: New Light on the Hereford and Ebstorf Maps”
The realtor’s familiar mantra intones the preeminent criterion by which our society assesses property value. I invoke it to stress the crucial role of location in the sign systems that medieval maps bring into play and on which they depend. My paper will pursue two complementary paths of inquiry: placement of the cartographic artifact in architectural space and place as an internal organizing principle of the cartographic image. Both the physical location of a map and the depicted location of places effectively situated medieval viewers within hierarchies that constituted their world. Paying homage to the title of the pioneering 1965 article that Gerald R. Crone published in The Geographical Journal, I will first attend to the Hereford Map. We now know the work’s original place and mode of installation in the cathedral’s north transept. I will introduce evidence of an art-historical and programmatic nature that corroborates Dan Terkla’s recent findings (Imago mundi 2004). The expanded argument brings more sharply into focus how and why the map functioned topographically within a combined funerary/ shrine complex to identify pilgrims with the dead. Turning next to the Ebstorf Map, I will consider the substance of Crone’s ideas about medieval approaches to the selection of places in the composition of the cartographic field. The Ebstorf Map is all about place. It answers the question, “Where is God?,” by engaging scholastic theories of place in which Eucharistic theology had long been implicated. It answers the question, “Where is Ebstorf,” by laying out an order of places that ties local history into the history of the universal Church: the former encapsulates and epitomizes the latter on the model of the relationship between part and whole of the Eucharist. The pre-eminent criterion for determining value is not distance from center, but conformity of micro- to macrocosm.
4:15 Meg Roland (Marylhurst University)
“‘After Poyetes and Astronomyers’: English Narrative Geography 1480-1600”
In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the production of world maps in England largely ceded to the advanced technology of continental map makers. World maps were likely imported into England as part of the early book trade, but material and documentary traces of the dissemination of Ptolemaic-based geographic representations are scant. That a cultural transformation took place in England in terms of geographic thought is certain but was largely undocumented by English-produced cartographic artifacts; that is, by English world maps. This absence has led some scholars to speculate that England was isolated from the cultural changes implicit in and informed by new cartographic representation. Literary and popular texts from 1480 to the mid-sixteenth-century, however, provide evidence that English literary culture provided a readerly construction of geographic space and a textual authority based on “Poyetes and Astronomers.” Texts such as Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, Caxton’s edition of Mirrour of the World, More’s Utopia, Rastell’s A New Interlude and Mery of the Four Elements, Elyot’s A Boke Named the Governour, and the almanac The Kalendar of Shepherds along with its offshoot, The Compost of Ptolemy, comprise the primary evidence for the dissemination of geographical thought in England in the late medieval and early modern period. Drawing on the disciplines of literature and social geography, I will argue that the new medium of print fostered the development of geographical thought in England through the production of narrative works as well as through visual allusion, in particular through the accompanying printed images of Ptolemy, a figure at once of mystification and symbolic capitol. In addition, medieval romance, travel narratives, and chivalric chronicles still in circulation in the early sixteenth century were foundational reading in the development of what Peter Barber has identified as nascent Tudor “map consciousness,” suggesting a more porous boundary between late medieval and early modern literature and geographic thought.
5:00 Discussion
Saturday, May 30, 2009
University of California, Los Angeles
Royce Hall 314
8:30 am Coffee, Tea, Pastries
Session 3. Embodied Geographies
Chair: Matthew Fisher (UCLA)
9:00 Daniel Birkholz (University of Texas at Austin)
“Atlas of a Medieval Life: Biography, Cartography, Roger de Breynton (c.1290-1351)”
This paper takes as its launching point the documentary “life-map” that I have constructed for one medieval subject—a well-traveled but now obscure cathedral clerk named Roger de Breynton (c.1290-1351). Breynton was a protégé of Hereford Bishops Richard Swinfield (1283-1317) and Adam Orleton (1317-27). Reconstructed from archival sources, my protagonist’s career itinerary (or collection of “roads taken”) is revealing for how it alternately conforms to and departs from the geographical experiences usually presumed to obtain for the period. Breynton’s spatial trajectories run a local, regional, national, and international gamut. This means that the “bio-cartographical grounds” upon which my essay builds are expansive in and of themselves. But “Atlas of a Medieval Life” also concerns an important next stage in the project of reading cartography and biography together. What the essay offers in this respect, beyond its medievalist life-map, is a sense of how maps were consumed by contemporaries. Specifically, it considers how various maps may have impacted one medieval life. When speculating about map reception (as all must do), historians of medieval cartography tend to deal in collectivities: we determine social meanings by reconstructing maps’ operative “original settings” and “institutional contexts.” My goal in “Atlas,” by contrast, is to describe how one specific medieval person understood the multiple maps (and related cartographic images and geographic texts) he encountered. The Hereford Cathedral Mappamundi looms large in my project, but the roster of maps Canon Roger Breynton knew intimately (including a Hereford copy of Gerald of Wales’ Europe), may well have known (considering his travels around England and in France), or known of (considering his contacts in royal, ecclesiastical, and university milieus), is surprisingly substantial. My essay, then, approaches its work of “mapping medieval geographies” from a stubbornly idiosyncratic perspective. It does so by addressing the map-reading experience—and more broadly, the imaginative geographical experience—of a single documentary individual, whose spatial biography is by turns culturally representative and historically distinct. To insist upon a radically individualized vantage point offers, paradoxically, an expanded interpretive purchase upon these artifacts. For without an individual such as Roger Breynton to look at them, the meanings of extant maps remain frozen according to the production and initial display contexts that are usually imagined for them—constructed in a manner, one might add, which is no less historically arbitrary than my own.
9:45 Melanie Caiazza (University of Kent)
“‘Next to John Holland’s Hedge’: Late Medieval Experiences of Authority in a Small Island Landscape”
Medieval geographical studies have been dominated by research into traditional places of authority such as royal palaces and castles; however, little research has been conducted into how smaller freehold property owners have manipulated legal systems and language in order to ensure the inheritance of small landholdings within a local area. My paper will discuss how detailed textual mapping of freehold property, as evident within a wide range of testamentary evidence, has revealed local geography as places of constant change and transmission, physically and socially. Whilst providing a range of comparative examples of visual (cartographic) and textual descriptions from one small island community, the objective of my paper is to generate discussion on mapping discourses as well. Furthermore, this paper will provide a range of compelling evidence; such as imagined and (auto)biographical narrative discourses from testamentary material which traces generations of place transmission through family inheritance whilst also arguing for more detailed landscape studies. Finally, my paper will show the importance of biographical writings to visualising medieval geography.
10:30 Break
10:45 Kathy Lavezzo (University of Iowa)
“Geographies of Gender and Race in Medieval Norwich”
A central premise of my first book (Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and English Identity, 1000-1534, Cornell UP, 2006) was the capacity of space to complicate our understanding of identity formation. Namely, I examined imagined geographies of the world and its western Roman capital (as envisioned in mappae mundi and literary texts) in order to analyze the complex ways in which English identity was constructed during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In this paper, which comes from my second book project (tentatively titled “Christians, Jews, and the Making of English Space: Literature, Architecture, and Finance, 1066-1656”) I also demonstrate the use of space to complicate our understanding of identity, but do so with respect to the case of Christians and Jews in Medieval and Renaissance England. Scholarship on Anglo-Christian representations of Jews has at times stressed how the English imagined their own spirituality, purity, unity, and sovereignty through opposition to a Jewish other that is perceived as carnal, contaminated, fragmented, and disempowered. But analysis of the imagined geography of Jews and Christians provides us with a powerful means of destabilizing that binary of Christian “self” and Jewish “other.” In particular, the paper will examine the history and representation of the built environments of Jews and Christians—particularly Christian cathedrals and Jewish homes—in England after the Norman Conquest and before the expulsion of the Jews in 1290. In the blood libel legends that notoriously originated in England, the imagined Jewish perpetrator of violence against Christian boys is closely linked with the home in which the “crimes” occur. The Jewish home is produced as a site of violence, filth, and carnality that opposes the purity and spirituality of the cathedral, the Christian edifice to which the child “martyr” finally is translated in such myths. But as cultural geographer Henri Lefebvre has taught us, “the multiplicity of space” radically challenges any effort to enlist geography in the construction of fixed identities. Keeping Lefebvre’s insight in mind, the paper will focus on the interpenetration and mingling of Christians and Jews via their built environments. Examples include: the sheer proximity of Jewish homes and Christian churches (and even the travels of Jews within Christian abbeys and cathedrals for business purposes), the role of Jewish financing in the erection of Christian churches, the shared materiality of Jewish homes and Norman churches after the conquest (i.e., their stone construction), and the erection of churches on the site of Jewish homes. Key texts I will analyze include: William of Newburgh’s History of English Affairs, the St. Albans Chronicle, Thomas of Monmouth’s Life of William of Norwich, and the Jocelin of Brakelond’s Chronicle of the Abbey of St. Edmonds. The paper will conclude by speculating on the significance of place icons in a medieval world map produced in England around the time of the Jews’ expulsion, the Hereford mappamundi.
11:30 Sarah Gordon (Utah State University)
“Disability and Travel to Multiple Pilgrimage Sites in Medieval Miracle Narratives”
Crossing geographic boundaries, medieval miracle narratives recount disabled pilgrims obligated to travel to more than one site to be “cured” of a disability or physical impairment in a sacred space. This study on literary representations of trips to multiple pilgrimage sites compares the thirteenth-century miracle narratives from Spain and France. In _Cantiga de Santa Maria_ 117, for example, a seamstress who cannot sew is cured at Chartres after a series of unsuccessful pilgrimages in other regions. Elsewhere in the _Cantigas_, German and Spanish pilgrims visit multiple sites, including Santiago, where they do not receive a cure, only to experience a miracle at another site, Villa-Sirga. In Cantiga 333 a poor man, with “twisted limbs,” confined to a cart for 15 years, undertakes many foreign pilgrimages to different saints but is not cured until he arrives at Terena and other pilgrims from his homeland come to pray for him. After theorizing briefly notions of disability in the Middle Ages, this study explores the distance traveled, the difficulty of overcoming geographical features, the number of sites visited, and representations of the physical transformations.
12:15 Discussion
12:45 Lunch
Session 4. Imagined Geographies
Chair: Meg Roland (Marylhurst University)
1:45 Karen Pinto (Gettysburg College)
“Portraits of ‘the West’ in Arab Maps and Poetry”
This paper analyzes the representation of al-Andalus and North Africa in medieval Islamic maps from the 10th century onwards. In contrast to other maps of the Mediterranean, which display a veneer of harmony and balance, the image of the Maghrib is by deliberate design one of conflict and confusion; of love and hate; of male vs. female; of desire vs rejection. This paper interprets and explains the reasons behind the unusual depiction of al-Andalus and the Magrib by medieval Islamic cartographers. In addition, this article develops a new methodology of interpreting medieval Islamic maps employing a deconstruction of the forms through an analysis of different levels of gaze. The analysis unfolds into the use of erotic and nostalgic Arabic poetry as a lens of interpretation for Islamic maps. Thus this article also presents a new methodology for analyzing the interconnection of word and image in the Islamic context.
2:30 Camille Serchuk (Southern Connecticut State University)
“Gaul Undivided: Cartography, Geography and Identity in France at the Time of the Hundred Years War”
This paper will show how the circumstances of the Hundred Years War reshaped and to some extent mythologized French awareness of the geography of realm and transformed its representation. Drawing on texts and maps produced at the end of the Middle Ages, it will explore the different ways authors and mapmakers defined France at a time when the English occupation inspired the French to insist upon their territory as legally and historically legitimate and inviolable. The changing fortunes of particular cities and regions are also reflected in the manipulation of existing conventions for the description of the realm: sources such as Isidore and Orosius, as well as the boundaries defined by the Treaty of Verdun, are modified to reflect French claims to the extent of their territory, if not the wartime reality. Thus, in texts and maps, in Latin and the vernacular, geography became a tool to bolster an emerging sense French identity in the face of the English occupation of French territory.
3:15 Break
3:30 Sara Torres (UCLA)
“Purgatorial Voyages in Anglo-Iberian Cultural Exchange”
This paper seeks to draw a connection between two popular hagiographical traditions that involve voyages or visions which thematize the liminal place of Purgatory: St. Patrick’s Purgatory and the Voyage of Saint Brendan. Both of these rich traditions were widely dispersed geographically and linguistically in medieval Europe, and both demonstrated a fascination with the exotic characteristic of travel literature of the period. My paper produces a reading of two specific late medieval Iberian redactions of these tales. The first is the Catalan “Historia del caballero Tuglat” (Barcelona, Archivo de la Corona de Aragón, MS 83), one of several surviving peninsular vernacular manuscripts and incunabula which preserve texts of Tundale story. The second is a Catalan version of the "Voyage of Saint Brendan" (Vic, Biblioteca Episcopal 174), which uniquely contains narrative digression in which Saint Brendan visits Persia and the Holy Land. I am interested both in the textual transmission and literary implications of these narratives, and also in their existence as an example of cultural exchange between two geographical areas—the British Isles and the Iberian Peninsula—that were considered to lie on the periphery of the Continent (but for whom this periphery was central to later Atlantic exploration). This paper represents the early stages of research for my dissertation on Anglo-Iberian cultural exchange from Eleanor of Castile to Katherine of Aragon, a project which is deeply engaged with critical discussions regarding the theoretical, symbolic, and phenomenological dimensions of space in relation to the literary-critical investigation of medieval texts.
4:15 Covadonga Lamar Prieto (UCLA)
“The Origin of the Mexicans in Juan Suarez de Peralta’s 'Tratado del descubrimiento'”
One of the most crucial questions that Colon’s arrival to America propiciated was the idea of where the population in the new continent came from: where in the Bible or the tradition in general terms they were depicted. However, the first generation of European descendents born in America faced a different question. While their parents had confronted the sudden encounter, they were born in the shocked after conquest societies. Consequently, the Indian population and their cultural achievements suddenly became an almost impossible concept to insert among the narrow walls of Eurocentric knowledge. Juan Suarez de Peralta, son of a Spanish conquistador and native himself from Mexico, lived in the convulse XVI New Spanish Viceroyalty. On his book Tratado del descubrimiento de las Indias y su conquista tries to explain, with Eurocentric Classical and Medieval authorities, the presence of the Aztecs in America. As a result, he builds a complicated sum of impressions, common places and inexact biblical references to try to explain, mainly to a European reader, the origin of the Mexican natives.
5:00 Discussion
5:30 Closing Discussion
Chair: Keith Lilley (Queen’s University Belfast)
Advance Registration: Not required. Please sign the attendance sheet at the door.
Fee: None
Seating: Seating is limited. Seats available on a first-come, first-served basis.
Parking: Parking permits are $9 from any UCLA Parking Services kiosk. Tell them you are here to attend “the Mapping Medieval Geographies Conference in Royce Hall.” You will be directed to park in the nearest available lot.
