Geography & Domestic Recreation in Early Modern Europe

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• published: 15 Apr 2014
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This lecture explores how world geography shifted from professional knowledge to general interest in 17th- and 18th-century Europe, looking in particular at domestic activities designed to encourage the collection and memorization of geography by non-professionals, including coloring maps and botanical texts and recipes for colors; interactive prints and games; and geographic memorization cards. Beyond an educational pastime, these activities neatly divided the globe into the familiar continental structure of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America; categorizing various human communities into "useful" comparative frameworks. Based on research conducted on Library collection items and in the optical properties laboratory of the Library's Preservation Directorate, using Hyper-Spectral Imaging (HSI) and X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) to identify pigments on printed cartographic images, providing information as to the availability of materials Europeans found necessary for such geographic pastimes. Speaker Biography: Stephanie Stillo received her M.A. from Western Washington University in 2009, with major fields in European History and Women's Studies. She entered the Ph.D. program at the University of Kansas in 2009 with an emphasis on urbanization in the Spanish Empire, with minor fields in Latin American History and Gender Theory. Stillo's dissertation, "Forging Imperial Cities: Seville and the Formation of Civic Order in the Early Modern Hispanic World" focuses on the way an interwoven network of noble merchants, artists, and cartographers in both Spain and Latin America transformed the Habsburg's ethnically and geographically disparate empire into a visually unified global community in the 16th and 17th centuries. In 2012-2013 Stillo was a visiting scholar at the Library of Congress through a CLIR/Mellon Fellowship. For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=6254