Displacement: Maps and Emotions in Othello

Abstract

The middle decades of the sixteenth century in Europe saw an immense expansion in the printing of books for a popular market. As this demand intensified, it also diversified to include maps. More and more maps recorded the surge in voyages of exploration and inter-continental travel for trade, so that cartographers began to enter into working partnerships with printing houses.1 Most notably, the great Plantin printing and publishing house in Antwerp, soon after its foundation in 1555, began to work in collaboration with prestigious mapmakers of the time, among them Mercator and Ortelius. Together they produced editions of single maps and whole collections of regional and global maps that would become generically known in the next century as ‘atlases’. Plantin was soon exporting maps and globes from Antwerp to booksellers in Spain, Italy and England, Germany and France. At the Frankfurt book fair in 1564 a catalogue of cartographic publications emerged for the first time. This new category was based on the stock list created by the Augsburg bookdealer Georg Willer and grew to the point where ‘by the 1570s Willer was listing so many maps that he devised separate sections for wall-maps, for maps from Venetian publishers, and for a cornucopia of historical, astronomical and military maps’.2 Maps were being bought and sold across Europe and among them were English collectors, notably Dr John Dee.3