The objective of this essay is to propose a cultural history of cosmography and cartography from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. It focuses on some of the processes that characterized these fields of knowledge, using mainly western European sources. First, it elucidates the meaning that the term cosmography held during the period under consideration, and the sci-entific status that this composite field of knowledge enjoyed, pointing to the main processes that structured cosmography between the thirteenth centu-ry and the sixteenth century. I then move on to expound the circulation of cosmographic knowledge among Portugal, Venice and Lisbon in the four-teenth and fifteenth centuries. This analysis will show how cartography and cosmography were produced at the interface of articulated commercial, dip-lomatic and scholarly networks; finally, the last part of the essay focuses on the specific and quite distinctive use of cosmography in fifteenth-century European culture: the representation of “geo-political” projects on the world through the reformulation of the very concepts of sea and maritime net-works. This last topic will be developed through the study of Fra Mauro’s mid-fifteenth-century visionary project about changing the world connectiv-ity through the linking of several maritime and fluvial networks in the Indi-an Ocean, Central Asia, and the Mediterranean Sea basin, involving the cir-cumnavigation of Africa. This unprecedented project was based on a varietyof sources accumulated in the Mediterranean Sea basin as well as in Asia and in the Indian Ocean over the course of several centuries.
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