This is a study of Japanese folding screens decorated with a variety of cartographic imagery of European origin. The central argument of this work is that Japanese cartographic namban screens made during the period considered in this dissertation can assist us to further understand the marked Christian eschatological character of the pictorial programmes decorating these screens, reflecting European contemporary hopes about the messianic coming of a universal Christian King, and about the Christian future of Japan at the onset of Shogun Tokugawa Hidetada's ban against Christianity (1614). By taking into account the use of folding screens as diplomatic gifts, this research seeks to argue that the hybridity of namban cartographic screens reveals as much about the expectation of Jesuit missionaries towards the evangelization of the Japanese archipelago as they did about how Japanese artists and observers understood European cartographic knowledge within a pre-existing local ritual use of maps and cartography. This dissertation is composed of four chapters. In chapter one I describe the material qualities of folding screens, the architectural environments in which they were displayed, and how the practice of donating folding screens as diplomatic gifts was eventually co-opted by the Jesuit missionaries operating in Japan. Chapter two is a discussion on the organization and the passage of the first Japanese diplomatic mission in Europe and the role that European cartography and geographical allegories played in this event. In chapter three I will examine the dissemination of Christian sacred images in Japan and the establishment of a Jesuit school to train Japanese artists in western-style painting. Chapter four unpacks the discussion developed in the preceding chapters and focuses on two specific pairs of namban cartographic screens - the Map of the World and Twenty-Eight Cities (today at the Imperial Household Agency in Tokyo) and the Battle of Lepanto and World Map (today at the Kosetsu Museum in Kobe) - for which I propose a new interpretation.

The overall purpose of this thesis is to study, in relation to geography education and with a historical perspective, the challenges of knowing and understanding the world. The cases are all from Sweden. In the first paper, educational ideas in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are studied, and the results indicate that some of the previously criticised educational ideas that were perceived as resulting from the ideas of nineteenth century regional geography in fact can be observed in earlier centuries and were criticised during the nineteenth century. In the second paper, school children’s ability to locate geographical names on outline maps is compared with children’s ability to complete the same task 45 years earlier. A total of 1,124 students were included in the latter study, and the results were compared with those from a study of 1,200 students from the same town conducted in 1968. The results raise questions regarding the picture of the continuous decline in children’s school results and show, for example, that children today are better at locating continents on a world map. The final paper identifies a new aspect of map reading difficulties. These difficulties in map reading are increasingly important in our global society, i.e., how the edges of the world map cohere. The paper shows that many map readers, children and adults, respond according to the idea of linear peripheral continuity, which indicates that the proposed continuation is along the straight line that continues tangentially to the original route when it crosses the edge. In general, this understanding leads to incorrect interpretations of the continuation of world maps. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following paper was unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 2: Accepted.</p>

This thesis investigates small-scale mappae mundi, world maps, created in the thirteenth-century, which record the historical, mythical, social, and religious reality of the world for wealthy English patrons. My research focuses on two maps found in a Psalm book (British Library Add. MS 28681, f. 9 and f. 9v) on either side of a single page. One depicts the world in typical mappae mundi fashion, with Jerusalem at the centre of a network of cities, topographic features and monstrous creatures while the other lists place names and geographic descriptions. The maps depict the world in very different manners, one textually and the other visually, but their placement on the same leaf emphasizes their connection. This work explores the iconography, socio-historic context and literary precedence of mappae mundi in order to comprehend the distinct need for mixed-media to represent and understand a complex worldly existence in thirteenth-century England.

Representation of the World in Early Maps Abstract The thesis deals with an analysis of the representation of the world in early small scale maps in the 16th - 18th centuries. The theoretical framework consists of the outline of the historical context of the given period with emphasis on the representation of the world in connection with the progress of the discoveries and the expansion of the geographical horizon. The development of navigation methods and technical means used to determine the latitude and longitude that had a direct impact on the positioning accuracy of topographic map elements are depicted, too. The practical part of the thesis is focused on the cartometric evaluation of selected map works of European cartographers of the period of 16th - 18th centuries, which consisted of the analysis of cartographic projection and the analysis of the positional accuracy of topographic content. The geometric accuracy of the maps is assessed mainly by the value of the positional deviations in the north-south and west-east directions. Based on the results of the cartometric evaluation, the evolution of the topographic content positioning is determined and the approximate time process of expanding the image of the known world on the contemporary maps is captured. The graphical outputs of the thesis are...