Margriet Hoogvliet

Forget the stereotype that women cannot read maps. In early modern Amsterdam, a surprising number of women were professionally involved in making and publishing them. Yet the history of cartography has been slow to recognise this, and some researchers still struggle to imagine that women could have played a meaningful role in the construction, printing, and distribution of maps.

Margriet Hoogvliet has identified 51 women who were active as mapmakers in Amsterdam between around 1580 and 1800. In this project, she re-evaluates the archival records documenting these women and places her findings within the broader European context of women’s economic and intellectual agency as artisans and printers. She also scrutinises the maps and atlases themselves to assess these women’s professional skills, scientific knowledge, and entrepreneurial spirit. The project sets out to transform the historiography of early modern Dutch cartography — a field that has long, and wrongly, been treated as an exclusively male profession.