Celebrating 25 Years of the Oxford Seminars in Cartography (TOSCA)

This special issue marks the 25th anniversary of TOSCA, The Oxford Seminars in Cartography, and their contribution to the discussion and dissemination of ideas associated with cartography, principally but not exclusively with the history of cartography. To celebrate this contribution, a conference was held in Oxford in September 2019 on ‘Enlightening Maps’. The five papers in this issue of the Cartographic Journal are a selection of those presented. An editorial introduction by Elizabeth Baigent and Nick Millea, the convenors of TOSCA, prefaces the papers. Baigent and Millea outline two central themes—the social spaces for the conversation that acts to circulate knowledge, and the personnel, politics and quality of that cartographical conversation—and discuss them primarily with reference to conversation in Britain on the history of cartography. Their introduction is thematically structured under ‘Map Seminars in Twentiethand TwentyFirst-Century Britain’ and ‘Maps in British Collections and Their Audiences’, in which latter context attention is paid to the map exhibitions in the British Museum and the British Library. This focus is a matter of individual practice, bespoke audiences and institutional prestige. These topics (with others) inform the five papers which follow. In ‘Writing Cartography’s Enlightenment’, Matthew Edney and Mary Pedley take a historiographical view of map history in the Enlightenment, both much-discussed if not always agreed-upon as topic and period. They begin by examining what they call the ‘old history of cartography’ in relation tomore recent work on the changing view of mapping in the Enlightenment. They dismiss, rightly, earlier notions of the Enlightenment as a sort of transitional period, its mapping distinguished by faltering moves away from the ‘cartography fabulous’ of the early-modern period and evident in a century and more of emergent depictive realism that preceded the rise in the nineteenth century of ‘cartography militant’ (the terms are mine, with apologies to Joseph Conrad). In remapping the history of cartography in the Enlightenment, importance is given to sociocultural approaches to map history and to the evident increase in ‘map-mindedness’ in the arts and humanities. We should also note their own outstanding role as co-editors of Cartography in the European Enlightenment, volume four in The History of Cartography published by the University of Chicago Press in 2019. The second half of their paper outlines the different contexts—representational, methodological, political and social—around which they organized the encyclopaedic treatment of Enlightenment mapping in that work in nine different modes: boundary mapping, celestial mapping, geodetic mapping, geographical mapping, property mapping, thematic mapping, topographic mapping, urban mapping, and marine charting. Map history in the Enlightenment is now not to be seen as a unitary narrative (from ‘Fabulous’ to ‘Militant’), but as a ‘set of multiple, precise narratives.’ This emphasis upon plurality, precision, different modes of mapping and on practice is exemplified in each of the other papers. In ‘Mapping the Fantastic Great Southern Continent, 1760–1777: A Study of Enlightenment Geography’, Vanessa Collingridge analyses the cognitive content of, and public reaction to, reports on the ‘fantastic life’ of the continent, principally in British newspapers and other public media. The French were intrigued by the Great Southern Continent too. Maps of the South Pole by Philippe Buache and James Cook appeared in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1763 and 1776 respectively, testament to a consuming public interest in the continent and how knowledge about it was secured. Katherine Parker has a similarly southern theme in her ‘Charting and Knowledge in Enlightened Empires: The