Mapping Imagined Territory. Quaresmio's Chorographia and Later Franciscan Holy Land Maps, in Constructing and Representing Territory in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, edited by Mario Damen and Kim Overlaet (Amsterdam University Press).

This contribution examines pre-modern cartography as a territorial technique for representing imagined territory, linking social groups to geographical space. It suggests that pre-modern maps could project territory by means other than visualising boundaries, and that accompanying texts could play a significant role, as in the case of Friar Francesco Quaresmio’s map of the Holy Land in Terrae Sanctae Elucidatio (1639). By analysing the immediate context of Quaresmio’s map – a lavish book publication – I show how Quaresmio’s Chorographia represents Franciscan territorial claims through an interaction between the map’s visual content and its immediate textual context within the book. Like other Franciscan maps also discussed here, it employs the imagined territories of the Bible as a versatile cartographical topos for various purposes, territorial or otherwise.