Story Mapping in the Dutch Republic (c.1600–1700)

‘Story mapping,’ which combines narrative and spatial information to tell a story about current or historical events, flourished in Europe in the early modern period, as cartography became accessible to a broader public and the printing press enabled a rich news and media culture.Footnote1 Story maps circulated as loose broadsheets, pamphlets, book illustrations, drawings, paintings, medals, and in other formats. The Dutch Republic was the largest seventeenth-century production centre of these story maps. There, numerous competing mapmakers produced works that were widely copied abroad. Warfare and conflict, in particular, generated a strong demand for cartographic representations of events, especially during the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648), when the Protestant Dutch overthrew their Catholic Habsburg rulers as they expanded imperial and colonial ventures overseas. This thesis addresses both the tools and techniques which mapmakers employed to combine narratives with maps, and the reasons why cartography was the preferred medium for telling these stories.