Maps and magic in Renaissance Europe

Contextual and interpretive approaches have broadened perspectives on historical cartography since the 1980s, but maps still continue to be understood as a means of encoding and communicating spatial information and ideas. These established approaches to maps, however, are embedded in modernist assumptions and may misrepresent the function and meaning of maps, especially in contexts such as Renaissance Europe. This article considers the meaning of the magical associations and aspects of Renaissance maps from a relational perspective. It is argued on historical and theoretical grounds that maps engaged, and were recognized to engage, directly with the workings of the world and thus exercised causations of a magical kind.The explicit magical associations of cartography waned towards the end of the 17th century, but the magic of maps became hidden rather than lost in the process.