In Europe the study of the history of cartography has a long tradition that dates back to the Renaissance, but its establishment as an independent science had to await the works of L. Bagrow and others since the 1930s. During the ensuing fifty years, a great effort has been devoted to organizing an academic and social framework, including publishing general histories of cartography and facsimiles, and founding the academic society Imago Mundi. During the 1980s, paradigmatic changes occurred in the view and methodology of study in this field. These changes were initiated by P. D. A. Harvey's The History of Topographical Maps and particularly by Concepts in the History of Cartography by M. J. Blakemore and J. B. Harley, both works published in 1980.
In this paper the contemporary Anglo-American trends in the study of the history of cartography after 1980 are summarized according to the categories of iconology, context, and social history.
1. History of Cartography as Iconology
Various methods of interpreting messages conveyed by means of icons and pictures embedded in maps have been employed in the study of the history of cartography and historical geography. In recent studies of the history of cartography, the analysis of animals (W. George 1978), heraldry (R. V. Tooley 1983), portraits (G. Schilder 1985, P. Barber 1990) and other icons found in maps, as well as of the typology of cartographic symbols and legends (C. Delano Smith 1988), has continued.
A synthetic method to consider the map as a whole, not to analyze each element on the map or its border separately, was proposed by Harley (1980 & 1983). He used E. Panofsky's iconology as a framework and suggested that a cartographic parallel existed.
Attempts to interpret the whole work as a single icon, semantically or symbolically, have often been limited to the title-page of an atlas, rather than considering the maps themselves. Although Tooley (1975) had published a collection of title-pages of atlases, it was R. W. Shirley (1987 & 1988) who systematically organized all of them. Nevertheless these title-pages are categorized only by their format and content, and there is no in-depth interpretation of any individual map. For instance, the title-page of the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum by A. Ortelius, the first modern atlas, should be seen as a stronger spatial expression of the Darwinian paradigm than of the relation between those dominating and dominated.
2. History of Cartography as Context
Beyond the iconographic interpretation, a contextual approach to consider the individual map in the context of the historical circumstances in which it was produced has been developed. The cultural context, or the relationship between the invention of maps in early modern Europe and the corresponding historical and cultural circumstances, especially those of art, has been discussed by R. Rees (1980), S. Y. Egerton (1987) and S. Alpers (1987). All of these credit the impact of the revival of the Ptolemaic grid system to art.
In the political and social context, Harley (1983) applied his method to the meaning and function of the various scale maps under the Tudors and developed cartographic semantics. The county maps of Saxton, for example, were prepared with such things in mind as the bureaucracy, defence, local administration and decoration, and they have been interpreted as symbolizing the county community and serving a social function as the identity of the county and as an intellectual discovery of England. Harley (1988) later employed M. Foucault's concept of power-knowledge and episteme to interpret the relationship between the maps and the ideology in them. This work attempted to divide the empty space in maps, interpreted as silence, into intentional and unintentional silence, and to investigate in particular the role of political, religious and social ideology in the unintentional silence.
