World Views: Maps and Atlases from Home to Research Library

Exhibition curated by Alice Schreyer and Jay Satterfield.

Early mapmaking combined art and science to render images that reflected and shaped current knowledge and accepted truths. Unbound and bound, maps serve a variety of purposes, both practical and decorative. Publishers produced individual sheet maps to be displayed on walls, carried on journeys or bound into volumes for consultation at home. Atlases, which consist of a set of maps issued and bound as a unit, present a vision unified by time and place of publication. Maps from the past are used by students and scholars in research libraries to reconstruct changing views of the world. This exhibition of maps and atlases, spanning the period from the late fifteenth through the early twentieth century, illustrates the uses of maps for recording, disseminating, and studying worldviews.