Worldly Consumers
The Demand for Maps in Renaissance Italy
Though the practical value of maps during the sixteenth century is well documented, their personal and cultural importance has been relatively underexamined. In "Worldly Consumers", Genevieve Carlton explores the growing availability of maps to private consumers during the Italian Renaissance and shows how map acquisition and display became central tools for constructing personal identity and impressing one's peers.
Drawing on a variety of sixteenth-century sources, including household inventories, epigrams, dedications, catalogs, travel books, and advice manuals, "Worldly Consumers" studies how individuals displayed different maps in their homes as deliberate acts of self-fashioning. One citizen decorated with maps of Bruges, Holland, Flanders, and Amsterdam to remind visitors of his military prowess, for example, while another hung maps of cities where his ancestors fought or governed, in homage to his auspicious family history. Renaissance Italians turned domestic spaces into a microcosm of larger geographical places to craft cosmopolitan, erudite identities for themselves, creating a new class of consumers who drew cultural capital from maps of the time.
About the Author
Genevieve Carlton is assistant professor of early modern European history at the University of Louisville.
Reviews
"Even as a handful of Europeans set out in the sixteenth century to explore the world, millions more stayed home and experienced it vicariously. 'Worldly Consumers' is an ingenious study of how and why ordinary people began to buy maps at unprecedented rates. These Renaissance maps may have represented the globe and its territories in a new and 'rational' way, but, as Carlton shows, they remained loaded with meaning. Maps were more than tools of state policy; they also became objects of consumer delight and display. Her exacting study – based on a subtle reading of new evidence from Venice and Florence – shows how Europeans embraced these more accurate pictures of the world to fashion more motile identities for themselves. With 'Worldly Consumers', Carlton opens our eyes to the new world that materialized at home" – Ken Alder, Northwestern University
"'Worldly Consumers' is very significant contribution to the history of the transformation of cartography in early modern Europe. By studying household inventories drawn up at the time and books advising on the display of art, Carlton successfully illuminates the roles that maps played in the public self-fashioning of Venetian and Florentine householders. One of the great strengths of the book is Carlton's handling of the religious meanings in cartography throughout her entire period: she presents the importance of maps for showing creation, unveiling the structure of the cosmos, and provoking awe and wonder in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries better than any previous scholar" – Victoria Morse, Carleton College
"'Worldly Consumers' concentrates on Venice and Florence, the major centers for the production and distribution of maps and where the strongest documentary evidence survives. Carlton's strength is her detailed and accurate examination of her fascinating primary sources – the inventories of Venetian and Florentine houses, which she uses to document the existence of maps in the domestic setting as well as, whenever possible, their location and display within the house. Through a careful reading of these inventories and the computation of the information derived from them, Carlton is able to examine in detail how many households displayed maps, what these maps roughly represented, where they were displayed, and how these elements contributed to identity construction. 'Worldly Consumers' is a solid contribution to the broader understanding of Renaissance culture, successfully establishing that the consumption of maps was part and parcel of the demand for goods in Renaissance Italy and how maps participated in the self-fashioning of their owners" – Francesca Fiorani, University of Virginia
