Worldly Consumers: The Demand for Maps in Renaissance Italy [Hardcover]

Though the practical value of maps during the sixteenth century is well documented, their personal and cultural importance has been relatively underexamined. InWorldly 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 ones peers.

Drawing on a variety of sixteenth-century sources, including household inventories, epigrams, dedications, catalogs, travel books, and advice manuals,Worldly Consumersstudies 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.

Genevieve Carltonis assistant professor of early modern European history at the University of Louisville.

"In describing map trade and consumption during the Renaissance in Italy, historian Carlton  bases her study on household inventories from Venice and Florence, and on the inventory of the Florentine map shop of the prominent Francesco Rosselli, an early Italian cosmographer, cartographer, and engraver. The book illuminates an alternative view of people's use of maps during this time, regarding them more as consumer goods than objects of political power.  A specialized work for scholars and libraries collecting materials on the history of cartography. Recommended."

"Looking at how printers in Venice and Florence developed an l#[