Please join us Tuesday, October 8th, in the seminar room at CESTA (Bldg. 160, Rm. 433A) from 12:00–1:00pm for the first lecture in our fall quarter CESTA Seminar Series. Ph.D. Candidate Rachel Midura will present: “Itinerated Europe: Early Modern Place & Space in Printed Itineraries, 1545-1747”
Abstract: This project brings together spatial and digital network analysis to explore a database of sixteenth through eighteenth-century printed itineraries. Before the advent of modern cartography, the itinerary was the height of geographic knowledge. Lists of cities and their relative distances opened European travel to a broad readership. By the mid-sixteenth century, private and public individuals carried such guides to navigate state networks of mounted couriers and staging posts. The itinerary database offers the ability to model a European “mental map,” preserving important directionality, hierarchization, and structural change over time. Using the case studies of Rome, Lyon, and London, I provide new periodization for changing European space in early modern print.
Bio: Rachel Midura is a sixth-year history Ph.D. Candidate and senior graduate fellow at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis at Stanford University. She is currently finishing her dissertation, “Masters of the Post: Northern Italy and the European Communications Network, 1530-1730” and an accompanying digital companion project, Early Modern Digital Itineraries (EmDigIt). In her research, she revisits traditional social, cultural and material historical approaches in order to incorporate twenty-first century understanding of media and social networks. Her work appears in the edited volumes Empires of Knowledge, Renaissance of Letters, and Print and Power. She is currently developing an article on EmDigIt for the Journal of Social History through the JSH/GMU Workshop for Articles on Digital History.