NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Luc Van den Borre
Date: 2021 Feb 23, 07:08 -0800
https://www.biblhertz.it/events/27090/2200
"Early modern navigators flocked to classrooms in port cities — but what did they learn there that they could not pick up aboard ship, or from the many textbooks in circulation in the 17th and 18th centuries? This lecture will examine Dutch, English, and French nautical manuals and manuscript workbooks to recover specific classroom exercises. By analyzing these diagrams, we can learn which elements of celestial navigation were most challenging, and how images could help mariners grasp confusing concepts. Students were expected to chart out traverse courses, a quotidian task made more comprehensible by visual strategies. These elaborate diagrams effectively served as bridges between textbook theory and daily practices at sea."
