Mapping Gender and Territory: The Continent Allegories on European World Maps from the Late Middle Ages to the Renaissance until the Early Enlightenment

Authors

Katharina Eva Oehmichen, Ruprecht-Karls-Universitat HeidelbergFollow

Document Type

Article

Abstract

The four-part set of female continent allegories, which originated in the early Renaissance, was born out of a European need for a new vehicle of thought that served the functions of representing imperial expansion and the superiority of Western science and civilization, while gratifying the curiosity of the readers about newly discovered lands at the same time. The shift from the Christian symbolic tradition of the representation of the continents on world maps mirrored the shift in Western perception and knowledge of the world and Europe’s position in it. Apart from geo-political and imperial agendas that might have favored a certain personification over another, the predominant depiction of the continents as young women also points towards a gendered bias in cartography that has persisted at least until the early nineteenth century during which the focus shifted towards national allegories, who have often been conspicuously personified as females, too. The trend of the continent allegories starting in the late Middle Ages, finds its climax during the Renaissance, and due to inner-continental European conflicts slowly begins to lose significance in the early stages of the Enlightenment. To understand the significance of gender in the representation of continents we will explore the artistic tools of mapmakers, namely the allegorical form. The female body, I argue, lent itself readily as a surface for Eurocentric ideologies, because, like foreign territory, women were frequently stripped of their agency, female identity was evaluated and hierarchized by beauty, and female bodies were utilized as objects onto which ideas could be projected by predominantly European male authors for an assumed male audience. The choice for an all-female set of continent allegories might have been inevitable rather than accidental, in the sense that female bodies already brought with them connotations of passivity, otherness, and male ownership. On top of that, women were often excluded from cartographic knowledge-making processes all together. And yet, the gendered practices and power structures in the processes of knowledge production have been vastly ignored by research so far. For a lack of space, the focus of this paper will be on the gendered aspects of the allegorical depictions of the continents on European world maps, although we need to acknowledge that the dimensions of race, class, and gender intersected and interacted with each other to create a colonial discourse.

Recommended Citation

Oehmichen, Katharina Eva (2024) "Mapping Gender and Territory: The Continent Allegories on European World Maps from the Late Middle Ages to the Renaissance until the Early Enlightenment," Comparative Woman: Vol. 3: Iss. 1, Article 2.
Available at: https://repository.lsu.edu/comparativewoman/vol3/iss1/2