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Copyright of Kırıkkale University Journal of Social Sciences is the property of Kirikkale University Journal of Social Science (KUJSS) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The authors conducted a study to describe the watermarks appearing in the text and map pages of the early Rome editions of Ptolemy's Cosmography in order to date individual maps. They visited several institutions and libraries in Europe in person to study the atlases. Information and photographs concerning their atlases from institutions and libraries in the United States were collected by email correspondence. Information on some atlases was found directly on the internet. The conclusion is that each edition is characterized by its own specific watermarks. Photographs of all the watermarks found in each edition are displayed in this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines why the first Chief Cosmographer-Chronicler of the Indies, Juan López de Velasco (c. 1530–1598), did not fulfill his historiographic duty of writing a general history of the Indies. It argues that although Velasco's tenure (1571-1591) at the Council of the Indies saw a high point in the accumulation of historiographic knowledge and information about Castile's Spanish-American possessions, the structural peculiarities of the cosmographer-chronicler's office disposed Velasco to prudently eschew writing an official history of the Indies. To appreciate and understand those peculiarities, the article focuses on three interrelated factors: the patronage networks at the royal court and their relation to monarchical bureaucracy; the Council of the Indies administrative reforms that led to the creation of the chief cosmographer-chronicler's office; and the climate of secrecy and censorship regarding knowledge of the Indies during Philip II's reign. The overarching emphasis, however, entails a consideration of the relationship between knowledge about Castile's American territories and monarchical bureaucracy, from the perspective of the Habsburg royal court in Madrid. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The incorporation of paper instruments, also known as volvelles, into astronomical and cosmographical texts is a well-known facet of sixteenth-century printing. However, the impact that these instruments had on the reading public has yet to be determined. This paper argues that the inclusion of paper instruments in Peter Apian's Cosmographia transforms the text into a book-instrument hybrid. The instruments and accompanying text in Cosmographia enabled readers to make their own measurements and calculations of both the heavens and the earth. Through the experience of manipulating the instruments, the readers became participants in sixteenth century mathematical culture, and thus mathematical amateurs. I conclude that the presence of these mathematical amateurs contributed to a much broader social base for the cultural shift towards an empirical understanding of nature from 1500 to 1700. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this essay is to propose a cultural history of cosmography and cartography from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. It focuses on some of the processes that characterized these fields of knowledge, using mainly western European sources. First, it elucidates the meaning that the term cosmography held during the period under consideration, and the scientific status that this composite field of knowledge enjoyed, pointing to the main processes that structured cosmography between the thirteenth century and the sixteenth century. I then move on to expound the circulation of cosmographic knowledge among Portugal, Venice and Lisbon in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This analysis will show how cartography and cosmography were produced at the interface of articulated commercial, diplomatic and scholarly networks; finally, the last part of the essay focuses on the specific and quite distinctive use of cosmography in fifteenth-century European culture: the representation of "geo-political" projects on the world through the reformulation of the very concepts of sea and maritime networks. This last topic will be developed through the study of Fra Mauro's mid-fifteenth-century visionary project about changing the world connectivity through the linking of several maritime and fluvial networks in the Indian Ocean, Central Asia, and the Mediterranean Sea basin, involving the circumnavigation of Africa. This unprecedented project was based on a variety of sources accumulated in the Mediterranean Sea basin as well as in Asia and in the Indian Ocean over the course of several centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role of Portuguese pilots at the Casa de la Contratación, or House of Trade, in Seville in the sixteenth century. While much work has been done on seafaring and pilotage in Spain in this period, relatively little has been said about the role of the Portuguese in the development of nautical science and a maritime tradition in the Spanish Indies route. The article further assesses the development of a pilot-training and licensing system in Seville, and examines the contributions and experiences of Portuguese seamen in this context. The Examenes de Pilotos, or Pilots’ Examinations, stored in the Archive of the Indies in Seville, contain several examples of Portuguese applicants in the mid-to-late sixteenth century, and these form the main body of primary material examined in the article. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Illustrations of urban scenes naturally describe the physical characteristics of the places depicted. These representations also express implicitly broader beliefs which tie the spatial order of the surrounding world to local systems, institutions, and human actions. Images of a city embody, therefore, an ‘urban cosmography’, a concept inspired by early modern artisans' attempts to chart the contours of the world, both known and unknown. Seen from this perspective, historical graphics such as maps, posters, and birds-eye views document a city's position within a continually evolving universal order. This paper will review graphics drawn from the history of one city in particular: Baltimore, Maryland. Like other cities on the eastern seaboard of the US, Baltimore has been represented by diverse visual arts for more than two centuries. With the advent of digital and social media, Baltimore's development will depend even more upon the city's local and global interrelationships. ‘Urban cosmography’ is, therefore, a useful conceptual prism through which one may perceive the link between the city's historical legacy and contemporary urban challenges. One consequence is that visual tropes for traditional urban polarities – ‘growth’ versus ‘decay’, for instance – may be superseded by new symbols that incorporate both. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article I examine the development of a scientific methodology in sixteenth-century Spanish nautical science, especially in the context of the Portuguese contributions to that development. I am particularly concerned with the contributions of the Portuguese cosmographer Francisco Faleiro, and with questions why his legacy remains comparatively unexamined when compared with his Spanish and Portuguese contemporaries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The rediscovery of the Selden Map of China (MS Selden Supra 105) in the Bodleian Library in 2008 provides an opportunity to reassess the history of Chinese cartography and debates about maritime dimensions of the Ming Empire. The map depicts a network of Chinese shipping routes, reaching from Japan to Aceh, Sumatra, and suggests previously unknown map-making techniques. In this article I draw attention to the map's unique components, notably its portrayal of shipping routes and vegetation, consider its sources, and suggest a possible patron and location of composition. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite its poor contemporary reception, François de Belleforest's Cosmographie universelle (1575) made important contributions to French history and national identity in the sixteenth century. Not only did it provide the first erudite history of Paris in the style forming at that time, but it also contributed to the development of a conception of the French people that grounded national consciousness in an amalgam of local experiences and Gallic history. Historians have tended to treat cosmography, chorography, and national history as separate genres with different concerns. Yet the influence of the Cosmographie universelle, measured more by the continual appropriation of its texts than by the commercial success of the volume, demonstrates that in the sixteenth-century intellectual world, these were interrelated and mutually influencing endeavors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the 12th-century cosmography that are discussed in the documents "De secretis philosophie" and the "Liber de orbe." It cites the different sections of "De secretis philosophie" such as divinity, health and disease, the integration of the fourth chapter of the "Liber de orbe," which is about the form of the firmament by way of circular figure, into "De secretis philosophie" and the influence of the "Liber de orbe" on the author of "De secretis philosophie."

'The Persistence of Myth: Written Authority in the Wake of New World Discovery' examines how classical authorities continued to influence scientific knowledge in the early modern period in spite of the emergence of more experiential and empirical methods of cosmography. Demonstrating that experiential evidence from travel literature and material evidence from the burgeoning culture of collection often endorsed rather than displaced myth, the paper argues that the preservation of myth is not a facile protection of power relations but is representative of how material reality is inherently connected to and supported by mythical structures. The paper performs a temporal short circuit, suggesting not that an impoverished early modern science failed to understand the significance of empirical evidence but that the emerging discourse of science sought a mutually sympathetic relationship among art, myth, and empirical evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper sets out to investigate several works of geography by authors such as William Cunningham, Abraham Ortelius, Gerard Mercator, Thomas Hill, Peter Heylyn, Periegetes Dionysius and Antonio de Torquemada, at the beginning of the 17th century. I wish to explore the moral scope of this overarching discipline and the cartographic metaphor underlying early modern works of geography and their impact on travel writing in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ninth/fifteenth century Arabic work, Kharīdat al-ʿAjaʾib wa Farīḍat al-Gharaʾib, ascribed to Ibn al-Wardī (d. 861/1457), was frequently translated into Ottoman Turkish and widely read by the Ottoman literati between the tenth/sixteenth and thirteenth/nineteenth centuries. The most popular translation of the Kharīdat al-ʿAjaʾib that is extant today with more than thirty copies in libraries worldwide was made by the tenth/sixteenth century Ottoman preacher Maḥmud al-Haṭīb. Within the context of Medieval Islamic cosmographical works and their translations, which have potential to shed light on the Ottoman worldview in the early modern era, this paper delves into the extra-textual statements of the translator in the form of eye-witness accounts and contemporary hearsay. By doing so, it argues that Maḥmud al-Haṭīb's intervention in the text he translated not only provides him with grounds for confirmation of the worldview promoted in the Kharīdat al-ʿAjaʾib, but also expressions on certain issues related to sixteenth century Ottoman rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the celestial atlas "Atlante veneto" and its astronomical diagrams authored by cartographer Vincenzo Maria Coronelli in 1691. Coronelli's atlas is described as a work of cosmography, said to have addressed geography and astronomy during the Renaissance. The images in the book are used to evaluate historical diagrammatic conventions of astronomy and cosmography.

India's Northeast frontier is at the margins of three study areas: South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia. This paper attempts a history of mapping in its broader sense as a cultural universal over a relatively long period. It is not a history of cartography, but focuses on the interface between cartography and cosmography, which were, in turn, shaped by imperial power and geographical knowledge. This approach offers a high-altitude view of this Asian borderland as the imperial frontier of both the Mughals and the British, and the national fringe of Republican India. The authors argue that imperial geographical discourses invested the colonial Northeast (British Assam) with a new kind of territorial identity. Surveyors and mapmakers objectified the geo-body of this borderland in a spatial fix and visualized it as a Northeast-on-the-map. Cartographic territoriality naturalized traditional frontiers into colonial borderlands, which, in turn, forged national boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article looks at the importance of navigation and cosmography in the Spanish empire during the exploration of the New World, focusing on the techniques and instruments used in a project aimed at examining the longitude of Spanish foreign territories through lunar eclipses. The historical precedents set by the project are reviewed. Mathematical models developed to calculate longitudinal coordinates are discussed. The author also presents an analysis of the project's accuracy in contrast to the results obtained through the use of modern computer algorithms.

The following article will aim at reconstructing an intellectual network of people interested in both astrology and cosmography in seventeenth-century New Spain. This study will trace a particular means of transmission and dissemination of knowledge, namely the exchange of books on astrology, in order to identify a network of astrologers and cosmographers who shared a similar educational background and who had similar motivations to get interested in the so-called occult sciences. By doing so, this research will reflect on the problem of disciplinary boundaries during the early modern-period, and on the question of transmission of knowledge in the Iberian World. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Big history' is a fresh approach to history that places human history within the wider framework of the history of the universe. In addition to telling the story of how everything has come to be the way it is, big history allows students from many different disciplines to become scientifically literate within a very short period of time. In this paper a brief overview of the approach taken by the course I have developed at the University of Amsterdam is placed within the wider context of the emerging field of big history. Based on energy and complexity studies, over the past dozen years major theoretical advances have been made that are now turning big history from a multidisciplinary into a truly interdisciplinary approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new wave of neo‐Boasian anthropologists advocate retrieving Boas’s sense of historicity. In his theoretical writings, and especially his early exchange with Mason and Powell in 1887, Boas linked history to Alexander von Humboldt’s “cosmographical” method and to inductive science, accusing evolutionists of reasoning deductively on the basis of artibrary classifications. Boas, on the contrary, would not classify but would consider the “individual phenomenon”. Strangely enough, Boas’s presentation of his scientific procedure has more or less been taken at face value, and I question this Boas‐centric view of Boas. Examining Boas’s theoretical statements, his onslaught against evolutionism and his ethnographic practice, I find the accusation of deductive reasoning against evolutionists totally polemical. Furthermore, I discover neither induction nor history or cosmography in his practice, but a Linnaean‐type natural history. In brief, I uncover an inverse image of what Boas presented of himself, and no basis whatsoever for retrieving a historicity for contemporary anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]