In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, geography began to be taught in European universities with increasing organization. More textbooks were being produced, disputations were held, and students had increasing occasion to become adept in reading and making maps. My research attempts to examine more closely the language and preoccupations of the educational documents through which practical geography was taught in university contexts, with a particular focus on the seventeenth century. My doctoral thesis described how a group of authors responded to the language of this educational material in fashions which overwent simple notions of “the representation of space” or “the mathematization of the globe.” I argued, instead, that they saw geography as participating in a broader humanist learned ethic, a curriculum where a habitus of personal behavior was, ideally, acquired.
In geography’s case, this habitus involved a prudential response to the varietas of worldly experience: a student of this version of geography would be able to abridge, store, and retrieve information with exceptional facility. As such, alongside textbooks, I examine such records of student performance as doctoral disputations and dissertations—one focus in my current research is a set of disputations held at the University of Basel in 1660 under the supervision of Philipp Jakob Spener, where the disputants connected the mathematical problem of longitude with Rabbinic devotional material, biblical exegesis, and ancient wisdom. An institutional culture such as Basel’s fostered a disciplinary capaciousness in geography that is striking to the modern reader.