The Fall Colloquium will take place at 7:30 PM on Friday September 18 at the home of Linda Marie Zaerr and Mark Jost, 1606 North 8th Street. At this event, we will welcome Karen Pinto into the Medieval Society. She will speak about “Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration.”
Maps do more than show us the way and identify major landmarks – rivers, towns, roads and hills. For centuries, they also offered a perspective on how societies viewed themselves in comparison to the rest of the world.
Reading maps from the medieval and early-modern Muslim world as carto-ideographic models of the medieval world reveals insights into the history of the period, much as first-person texts do. In these mid-tenth-century maps we see images informed by the work of other societies, by myth and religious belief, and by physical reality. We also see subtle reflections of the map-makers. Not only do the maps include physical details about specific regions, but many also illuminate the human geography of the land, including boundaries marked by the Muslim and Christian worlds.
We need history to understand the roots of what goes on in the world around us, and maps provide one very useful gateway. By studying the maps of other cultures we can begin to understand how different cultures viewed the world in different periods.
Karen Pinto is a native of Karachi, Pakistan. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University. She has taught at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon and at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. She has just joined Boise State University as Assistant Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern History. She has worked extensively with medieval Islamic maps in manuscript libraries around the world, and she has published a number of articles and encyclopedia entries on the history of Islamic mapping. She was the recipient of a 2014-15 NEH fellowship for her next book project on “The Mediterranean in the Islamic Cartographic Imagination.” Her current book Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration (University of Chicago Press) is forthcoming in early 2016.
We look forward to your company at this event. As always, we welcome superb food and drink to complement the splendid conversation following the presentation. For further information, please contact Linda Marie Zaerr at 384-5801.
Medieval eNewsletter Fall 2015
Text taken from The Medieval Society Fall 2015 newsletter.