Date/Time
Date(s) - 28 Mar 2012
5:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Location
University of Pennsylvania McNeil Center for Early American Studies
Category(ies) No Categories
2012 Mellon Distinguished Lecture Series
Sponsored by the School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania and the University of Pennsylvania Press
LECTURE TWO: “Vallard: The New Ecology of the Atlantic Basin”
Wednesday, March 28, 5:00 PM
McNeil Center for Early American Studies
3355 Woodland Walk
Europeans began to make longer and more frequent oceanic journeys in the sixteenth century. That travel brought them into increasing contact with non-Europeans, both in the Southwest Pacific and in the Americas. Among travelers of the period was the Breton explorer Jacques Cartier, who crossed the Atlantic three times in the 1530s. Cartier brought home much information about what is now the St. Lawrence Valley, and even before its widespread publication, news about what he had seen had arrived in Dieppe, a map-making center in France at the time. Cartographers there drew on reports from Cartier and others, many of them by Portuguese sailors, to create a collection of fifteen hand-painted maps, now known as the Vallard Atlas and housed in the collections of the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Produced in 1547, the Atlas contains five maps depicting the Western Hemisphere, including a Cartier-inspired map of Canada as well as images of Brazil and the territory along the Atlantic Coast. Using the Atlas and other maps from the period, in this lecture I will show how Europeans and Americans alike dealt with sudden changes in their natural environments and their ideals of Nature.
Series information:
“Nature and Culture in the Early Modern World”
Peter C. Mancall
Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities
University of Southern California
This series of three lectures will explore aspects of the relationship between people and nature in the Atlantic World in the sixteenth
century. Each of the lectures will begin with paintings: a series of images in a fourteenth-century cloister in the south of France; a hand-painted atlas, now housed at the Huntington Library, created in Dieppe in 1547; and a 1585 water color of a Carolina Algonquian town by the English artist John White, now in the collection of the British Museum.