Maps as Educational Tools in the Renaissance

Maps were part of both formal and informal education in early modern Europe, although they performed different functions and had a different status in each setting. While the more institutional curricula of grammar schools and universities treated geography as more important, with maps seen as useful only for their illustrative properties, informal market-driven and patronage-supported education privileged map knowledge as necessary for the gentleman or merchant. Increasingly during this period, those in positions of power saw maps as important imperial, mercantile, and aesthetic objects, and this encouraged an informal educational system, which relied on their patronage, to introduce maps into education. Humanists, the educational theorists of the period, bridged the informal and formal educational categories and, depending on their primary allegiances and sources of support, stressed or ignored maps as pedagogical tools. The success of the map as an important educational text in the early modern period owes most to the new court patronage structures and to the entrepreneurial mathematical practitioners rather than to the more traditional and institutional educational structures.