Seeing like a Pilgrim? The Alpine Imaginary in Early Modern Japanese Maps

Speaker:

Karen Wigen

Associate Professor of History, Stanford University

Japan in the Edo period supported one of the most robust publishing industries anywhere in the world, and among the most popular genres of woodblock printed materials was the map. After spending the first part of her career as a historian reconstructing the spatial patterns of regional economic change from gazetteers and other text documents, Kären Wigen has recently turned her attention to maps themselves, asking what they can tell us about how early modern Japanese understood their landscape. Her talk for the CEAS colloquium will focus on representations of mountains in atlases, itineraries, and mandala maps from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.