Shouldering the world in a different way: early modern images of people wearing maps

• Published in: Word & image (London. 1985) Vol. 40; no. 4; pp. 238 - 253
• Main Author: Van Duzer, Chet
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Abingdon Routledge 01.10.2024; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: 20th century; 21st century; cartography; clothing and dress; costume; Early modern period; political symbolism; seventeenth century; sixteenth century
• DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2024.2382001
• ISSN: 0266-6286

Following an examination of ancient texts about people wearing images of the world, this article addresses three early modern images of people wearing map-garments. All three images are symbolic-there is no pretense that these garments existed-and also highly political. The first is Nicolas de Lorraine's manuscript map of Provence, c.1536-38, which shows a personification of Provence wearing a map-garment of the region. The second is the frontispiece of Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion (1612), which shows an enthroned personification of England wearing a cartographic robe. The third is an anonymous English broadside of Louis XIV of France titled The Usurpers Habit, printed in 1691, which shows the king wearing cities that he has recently conquered in the Nine Years' War-some of which, however, he had recently been forced to surrender. The histories, contexts, and texts accompanying the images are given careful consideration, together with their political symbolism. The article ends by suggesting a trajectory from the ancient examples of cartographic garments as world maps representing absolute authority, to the early modern examples of national or provincial scope, full of political significance, to the banality of consumers wearing map-garments mass-produced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.