Imagining the World in the Italian Renaissance

This round-table will engage a public audience with the history of the Italian Renaissance by challenging received ideas about the nature of maps and the history of European exploration. By exploring complexities of artistic representation, spatial projection, and map production, the presentation will broaden attendees’ understanding of Renaissance culture and world history before the Age of Exploration, while also introducing them to some of the digital techniques scholars now use to study such maps. Presenters will include Carrie Beneš (New College of Florida), Chet Van Duzer (Rochester Institute of Technology), and Jessica Maier (Mount Holyoke College).

Participant Bios:

Carrie Beneš is a cultural historian of premodern Italy and the Mediterranean, focusing on the classical tradition, the cultural history of landscape and identity, and mapping/geospatial analysis. She is the author of Urban Legends: Civic Identity and the Classical Past (2011) as well as A Companion to Medieval Genoa (2018), and co-director of the La Sfera Project (sferaproject.org).

Chet Van Duzer is a widely-published historian of cartography and one of the world’s leading authorities on medieval and Renaissance maps. He is a board member of the Lazarus Project at the University of Rochester and a researcher-in-residence at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. He is the author of Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps (2013) as well as Henricus Martellus’s World Map at Yale (c. 1491): Multispectral Imaging, Sources, and Influence (2019).

Jessica Maier is an art historian of European Renaissance art and architecture in a global context, focusing on traditionally overlooked categories of imagery such as prints, illustrated books, maps, and city views, which provide new insight into a period of extraordinary cultural activity. She is the author of The Eternal City: A History of Rome in Maps (2020) as well as Rome Measured and Imagined: Early Modern Maps of the Eternal City (2024).

Laura Morreale is a cultural historian of the late medieval Italian peninsula whose interests in French-language writing extend to the Latin East. She is the creator of several digital projects such as the Oxford Outremer Map and the Harvard-based DALME Project (Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe)—as well as one of Dr. Beneš’s co-directors on the La Sfera Project. She is co-editor of the two-volume Digital Medieval Studies—Practice and Preservation (2022) and Experimentation and Innovation (2024).

Host or Publisher New College of Florida