Considerable advances have been made concerning the so-called ‘origins problem’, that is, the genesis of medieval nautical cartography in Europe: the medieval origin of portolan charts is now broadly accepted, a meaningful connection between charts and navigation was established, magnetic declination has been convincingly demonstrated to be the cause of their tilt, and most researchers agree that portolan charts were constructed using navigational data collected by pilots at sea. The possibility that more than one prototype may have been prepared during the thirteenth century, and that a primitive type of chart based on astronomical directions probably preceded the model of the earliest extant charts, were considered. Significant advances were also made in our understanding of how manuscript nautical charts and atlases were produced and copied in the medieval and early modern period. Three journal articles were produced around these subjects.
Research has also proceeded around broader issues concerning the nature and functions of nautical cartography in the early modern period. Two articles were published about the intimate connection between pre-Mercator nautical charts and marine navigation, their intrinsic geometrical incompatibility with geographical maps, and how these issues generated misunderstanding and conflict among scholars, cartographers, and pilots in the sixteenth century. A book was published containing a commented anthology of European texts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, where those issues are discussed.
Some progress was made on the use of pre-Mercator charts at sea, following the planned systematic examination of hundreds of charts, using the Medea-Chart database. A journal article was published with a study of one of the earliest extant charts showing marks of use, produced at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
In contrast to what may happen in some areas of the so-called “hard sciences”, the general public have no difficulty in understanding most results of our research and often express interest in them. This was also to be expected in a region of the world (Europe, and especially Portugal) whose historical contribution to nautical sciences and geographical knowledge is very rich. That is one of the reasons why public engagement and outreach have been an important concern of our project since its very beginning. As part of this activity, weekly newspaper articles were published during five months in the leading Portuguese newspaper “Público”, later gathered in a small book. In 2019, the project leader participated, as an invited speaker, in a TEDx event, in Lisbon:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjnzBWWyyaY(si apre in una nuova finestra). Also, several interviews (radio, newspapers, Youtube) were made to the team members, all directed at the general public. During the span of a year, 52 brief articles were published online weekly, all authored by the project team members, about charts contained in the Medea-Chart database:
https://www.medea-chart.org/news/categories/chart-of-the-week-carta-da-semana(si apre in una nuova finestra).
The end of project Medea-Chart was marked by two important events: an international workshop gathering some of the best-known world experts on the subject, where the results of the project were summarized and discussed (
https://www.portmeeting.org/programme(si apre in una nuova finestra)) ; and a public exhibition, “What is a Nautical Chart, Really” (Instituto Hidrográfico, Lisbon, Portugal), illustrating some of its most significant results.
An online information system (the Medea-Chart database) which was conceived, designed, and populated by the Medea-Chart team, with images and information of more than 6000 nautical charts and 600 atlases, is now fully operational and available worldwide to researchers and general public:
https://medea.fc.ul.pt/main(si apre in una nuova finestra). The associated code was developed by our computer science expert, Ricardo Vaz.
