May 28 - 30, 2009

Venue: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, UCLA, USA

Geography as it was understood and practiced in the Middle Ages, within both eastern and western traditions, and as represented both graphically and textually, is a subject of renewed interest and importance among historians, philologists and geographers.

This conference aims to promote an exchange between those of different disciplines working on geographical ideas and thinking from late Antiquity to the Renaissance on two broad themes:

1. “Translation, transmission, transculturation” will focus on the continuities in geographical knowledge from Antiquity into and through the Middle Ages; the complex transculturation of formal geographical and cartographic knowledge between Latin, Byzantine and Islamic scholars and travelers; and the copying and transmission of key geographical texts and sources, and their selection and adaptation.

2. “Mapping, imagining, placing” will consider questions of “scale, place, and the geographical imagination” looking at the changing distinctiveness, character and uses of “geography” in medieval thought; the intertextual nature of “medieval geography” between visual (cartographic) and textual descriptions, and connections between “thinking geographically” (i.e., spatial sensibility) and “geographical thinking” (i.e., writing and visualizing “geography”) in the Middle Ages.

Download the complete program:

- as a PDF (1.44 MB) at http://www.cmrs.ucla.edu/programs/map_med_geos_conf.pdf or

- as a webpage at http://www.cmrs.ucla.edu/programs/conference_mapmedgeos_program.html

Advance registration is not required. No admission fee. Seating is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis. Campus parking permits may be purchased for $9 each day from any UCLA Parking Services kiosk.

For more information, please write the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at cmrs@humnet.ucla.edu or call 310-825-1880.