‘confluence of costume, cartography and early modern european chorography’

Chorography appeared in early modern Europe as a broad strategy for world knowledge-seeking that gestured not only to physical descriptions of place, but combined for the first time in formal discourse, maps, costume descriptions, histories, chronologies and a host of other descriptors that aimed to frame an identity of place. While maps and textual descriptions of location have long been recognized as an essential part of chorographic studies, this study explores the role that costume imagery and descriptions played in constructing information within a chorographic framework. It is costume’s complex, dual relationship with maps, as well as its perceived symbolism of a people’s character and habits that makes it a consistently included yet overlooked facet of these new epistemologies that searched for ways to understand the difference of place. A central goal of this study is to broadly locate visual costume studies and textual costume description within the chorographic tradition using selected examples from the work of Albrecht Dürer and Wenceslas Hollar. As two artists who travelled widely and produced both maps and costume studies, their work attends to newly emerging concepts and practices of chorography.