Looking back on the first two weeks of my programme at UCC, I found that one of the discussion topics from my seminars that resonated with me the most was the question of maps and other geographical depictions. When I visited Marsh’s Library in Dublin last week, just a few days after said discussion in my Old English Literature class, I spent a long time contemplating some of the maps they had on display as part of their current exhibition, ‘Go West: Early Views of North America’1. While the historical and political contexts of these maps, their creation and purposes, differ from the ones we discussed in class, I found myself thinking back to some of the aspects we talked about. While I have encountered the topics of space and borders and their graphic and/or textual depictions in a wider sense before, I have not engaged in more detail with the processes and issues of trying to delineate, prescribe and preserve complicated and often fluid geographical, social and cultural circumstances on physical maps. Stopping to examine the sociohistorical inscriptions that maps carry, the implications they can reveal about the person or people creating the map, how they perceived and ordered their surroundings and wanted them to be perceived by others, what is shown and what is omitted and for which reasons, if we can reconstruct them, was very fascinating.
To get some more insights into the topic of maps, especially in a medieval and early modern context, I will be reading sections of Ingrid Baumgärtner’s Mapping Narrations – Narrating Maps: Concepts of the World in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period (2022)2 over the next weeks. I got the ebook shortly after publication, and it has been lying dormant on my reading list ever since, but I felt inspired to finally take it up. In earlier seminars, I have already encountered the topics of borders, liminal spaces and ‘other worlds’, but mainly from a German studies or contemporary children’s literature perspective. I remember being intrigued by the notion that specific locations like ‘forests’ or ‘wilderness’ can be read as spheres of subverting norms, transgressing and questioning social codes and wondrous and strange events in my German introduction to medieval studies lecture, so that is another aspect of interest I am hoping to recover and weave into my findings.
One of the reasons I decided to leave my (much beloved) former university to pursue a postgraduate programme in another place was that I wanted to broaden my horizons both on a personal and an academic level. This is not to say that I did not contemplate the chances and opportunities that the postgraduate programmes at home would have provided me with. In many ways, it would have been easier to continue my journey in a place and environment that I already knew how to navigate, but this is what also might have limited me and led me to stay away from challenges. As I have only moved to Cork about a month ago, leaving behind my family, friends and the place I consider my home, it is also a time for myself to head into new directions, question and evaluate some paths and borders and my own point of view, and jump a fence or two by delving into new perspectives and conversations.
This sets the tone for my blog quite nicely, I presume; this is a space to document and reflect on my personal academic development, and as such will contain what I hope is a healthy mixture of personal and academic thoughts, connections, interests and ideas. I have no previous blogging experience, so let’s see where this takes us.
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1See https://marshlibrary.ie/events/current-exhibition/ for a short description. Website last visited on Oct 9th, 2023.
2Baumgärtner, Ingrid: Mapping Narrations – Narrating Maps: Concepts of the World in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. Eds. Daniel Gneckow, Anna Hollenbach, and Phillip Landgrebe. De Gruyter, 2022.