Title: ‘Confluence of Costume, Cartography and Early Modern European Chorography’
Abstract: IntroductionThe early modem era is a rich point of entry for questions regarding how Europeans understood a world affected by increased global travel and trade, an expansion that began in earnest during the sixteenth century.1 Costume imagery and maps provided key lenses through which information about the foreign and unfamiliar was telegraphed to European audiences. A central aspect of costume studies focus on how clothing is understood as a cultural constmct representative of people, and also of place. Many, if not most early modem maps prominently incorporated examples of figures in regional costume around the borders of the map, or even superimposed over the territory in question. Costume imagery's origins as part of maps gave costume power as a representation of physical place, as well as a way to give form to the intangible qualities of culture, manners and customs. Altogether, maps and costume description allowed the early modem viewer to cobble together an understanding of place, however fragmentary.2Scholars have widely discussed the presence of costume studies on early maps, but these interrelated sources of costume imagery and cartography are usually studied as distinct visual phenomena. Most explorations of costume have focused on the contributions of costume books, predominately through ethnographic, gendered and class contexts, rather than through the specific relationship to their cartographic origins.3 This study argues for a re-examination of the links between early cartography and costume studies as dialogic in meaning; due to their common origins and goals as ways to define place, early modem costume imagery and maps visually and conceptually overlap in ways that suggest they shared responsibility as corollary ciphers of meaning. In other words, rather than subordinate costume imagery to the map on which it appears, it can be instead regarded as a significant partner in conveying cartographic information about place. In order to explore the intersecting relationship between costume and cartography more closely, this essay will approach these descriptions of place through their participation in the emerging field of chorography.Chorography appeared in early modem Europe as a broad strategy for world knowledge-seeking that gestured not only to physical descriptions of place, it combined for the first time in formal discourse, maps, costume descriptions, histories, chronologies and a host of other descriptors that aimed to frame the identity of place. While maps and textual descriptions of location have long been recognized as an essential part of chorographic studies, I suggest that costume must also be given its due as an important part of conveying this information within the chorographic framework. Costume is readily recognized as a way of communicating information, but it has been so far omitted from conversations about the overlapping, diverse kinds of information that constitute chorographic study.* * * 4 It is costume's complex, dual relationship with maps, as well as its perceived symbolism of a people's character and habits that makes it a consistently included yet overlooked facet of these new epistemologies that searched for ways to understand the difference of place. A central goal of this study is to broadly locate visual costume studies and textual costume description within the chorographic tradition, as one cipher of place in a semiotic aggregate of ciphers that grew to include maps and comparable data. To this end, case studies of Albrecht Durer and Wenceslas Hollar will highlight the contributions of selected artists whose far-ranging travels put them in a unique position to observe and collect records of contemporary costume as a way to establish an identity of place throughout the regions they visited, demonstrating their overlapping interests in cartography and costume. Because of the inseparable nature of costume, cartography and chorography, the complex identity of costume studies and costume books may themselves be positioned as nascent examples of chorography. …
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-12-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['doaj']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 3
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