The Women Who Made the Maps

From Ende, painter of the Girona Beatus in 975, to Anna Beek, the widows of the Amsterdam map houses, Mary Ann Rocque, Emma Willard and Marie Tharp: a thousand years of women in cartography, and how to recognise their work

The history of cartography is usually told as a procession of men: Ptolemy, Mercator, Ortelius, Blaeu, Cassini. Yet maps have never been made by one pair of hands. Behind every printed map stood a workshop, and in those workshops women drew, engraved, coloured, printed, sold and, more often than the title pages admit, ran the business. The first systematic attempt to count them, Alice Hudson and Mary Ritzlin's checklist of pre-twentieth-century women in cartography, published in 2000, gathered several hundred names, most of them unknown even to specialists. This article follows a few of them across a thousand years, from a Spanish scriptorium in 975 to the ocean floor in 1977, and explains what a collector should look for.

A painter and helper of God, 975

The oldest name belongs to a woman who signed her work when almost nobody did. The Girona Beatus, a manuscript of the commentary on the Apocalypse by Beatus of Liébana now in the cathedral of Girona, was completed on 6 July 975, probably in the monastery of Tábara in the kingdom of León. Its colophon names the scribe Senior, the monk Emeterius and "Ende pintrix et Dei aiutrix": Ende, painter and helper of God. The manuscript, its date and her name are well documented; how much of the painting is hers, whether she was a nun, and where exactly the book was made are matters of interpretation on which specialists differ. Among its pages is a double-leaf mappa mundi of the type found in most Beatus manuscripts, oriented to the east, with Paradise at the top, the three known continents and a fourth, unknown land beyond a red band of burning sea. Whether Ende painted that opening cannot be proved. What can be said is that she is an exceptionally early named woman associated with the illumination of a manuscript containing a world map.

The Ebstorf map, a circular world map of about three and a half metres that came to light around 1830 in the former Benedictine convent of Ebstorf near Lüneburg, was taken to Hanover in 1834 and destroyed there in 1943, has often been called the work of nuns. The evidence is thinner than the story. Its date, patron and maker are all disputed. One school of thought connects it with Gervase of Tilbury, on the hypothesis that he was the provost of Ebstorf in the 1220s; others place it around 1300, and Gudrun Pischke's identification of eight scribal hands points to a communal effort rather than a single author. That a women's convent kept, used and possibly produced one of the largest medieval world maps known is remarkable enough without embroidery.

Antwerp and Amsterdam: the widows who kept the plates

In the printing trades of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a widow inherited her husband's business, his stock of copperplates and, crucially, his privileges. Many sold up; some ran the firm for decades. Volcxken Diericx, widow of the Antwerp print publisher Hieronymus Cock, kept his house Aux Quatre Vents going for thirty years after his death in 1570, so that every impression from Cock's plates in those years, maps included, was printed under her direction.

A telling case is Colette van den Keere. Born in Ghent in 1568 and married in London in 1587 to the young Flemish engraver Jodocus Hondius, she was the sister of the engraver Pieter van den Keere and an engraver herself. Hondius bought Mercator's copperplates in 1604 and issued the renewed Mercator-Hondius atlas in 1606; when he died in Amsterdam in 1612, Colette carried the business on with her sons Jodocus the younger and Henricus. The double portrait of Mercator and Hondius that opens the atlas from 1613 has been attributed to her hand, an attribution that not every catalogue accepts: the Rijksmuseum lists its impression as the work of an anonymous engraver, published by Jodocus Hondius the younger. The Hondius atlases of the 1610s, in other words, came out of a house in which the widow had a leading part.

Two generations later the pattern repeated at the Visscher firm. Nicolaes Visscher II died in 1702 and his widow Elizabeth Verseyl ran the shop on the Kalverstraat until her own death in 1726, after which the plates passed to Petrus Schenk. Some of her issues carry her name, as "Vidua Nicolai Visscher" or "chez la veuve de Nicolas Visscher"; a two-sheet map of Scandinavia dedicated to Charles XII of Sweden, for instance, is catalogued under her name with exactly that imprint. Many other impressions from the same years simply keep the old imprint and can be assigned to her only when the state of the plate, a dedication or a datable detail places them between 1702 and 1726.

Amsterdam had more. Amelia 's-Gravesande, widow of Pieter Mortier, ran the Mortier business from 1711 until 1719, in the years before it became Covens and Mortier. Catharina Buijs, widow of Johannes van Keulen II, headed the Van Keulen chart house from 1755 until 1781, which means that for a quarter of a century the official supplier of sea charts to the Amsterdam chamber of the Dutch East India Company was a woman.

Anna Beek of The Hague

One Dutch woman published under her own name from the start, and not as a widow. Anna van Westerstee, born in The Hague in 1657, married the art dealer and print publisher Barent Beek in 1678. When he deserted her and their seven children in 1693 she obtained a divorce and took the business over herself; from 1697 the privileges were requested in her own name, and she renewed them in 1713 and again in 1717, the last for more than a hundred views of The Hague. Her speciality was the war news of the day: plans of sieges and battles of the War of the Spanish Succession, from Blenheim and Ramillies to Douai and Ghent, engraved for her mostly by Jan van Vianen and signed "A. Beek excudit" or "chez Anna Beek à La Haye". She also coloured maps professionally, and her finest work is a series of large, hand-coloured, gilt-bordered plans prepared for the topographical collection of William III, later dispersed. In 1713 she went to court against an Amsterdam competitor who had copied her images. About sixty maps and plans published by her between 1697 and 1717 are known, thirty of them in the Library of Congress, whose bound collection of plans of fortifications and battles also contains work by other publishers such as Gaspar de Baillieu. The first monograph on her, by Iris Blokker, appeared in 2025.

London and Paris

The London trade produced a comparable line of widows and daughters. In 1663 Anne Seile, widow of the bookseller Henry Seile, commissioned Robert Vaughan to engrave a new set of continental maps for editions of Peter Heylyn's Cosmographie. Ann Lea, widow of Philip Lea, ran the Atlas and Hercules in Cheapside from 1701 and reissued Saxton's county maps and Morden's map of the West Indies. Better known is Mary Ann Rocque, born Scalé, a Huguenot from a family of surveyors, who married the surveyor John Rocque in 1751 and on his death in 1762 took over the shop in the Strand with Andrew Dury. Signing herself "M. A. Rocque", she published his Survey of Surrey, a new edition of the Environs of London, a general map of North America recording the war of 1754 to 1761, and A Set of Plans and Forts in America, first issued in 1763 and again in 1765, thirty plates of the British forts from Nova Scotia to Georgia that remain an essential cartographic source for the Seven Years' War in America. In the nineteenth century Selina Hall, widow of the engraver Sidney Hall, continued to engrave under the signature "S. Hall" for Black's General Atlas and other publishers for some twenty years after his death in 1831. Because plates were reworked and reissued, the signature alone does not tell the collector who cut the original; it is the combination of the signature, the geography shown and the history of the plate that points to her.

In Paris the daughters of the engraver Jean-Baptiste Haussard, Catherine and Elisabeth, engraved cartouches for maps by Bellin and Robert de Vaugondy in the 1750s, signing in the decorative work that most collectors admire without reading.

America: teachers, inventors and one Beothuk woman

In the young United States women entered mapmaking through the schoolroom. Emma Hart Willard, the founder of the Troy Female Seminary, published in 1828 A Series of Maps to Willard's History of the United States, twelve maps engraved by Samuel Maverick that show the country's growth in stages, beginning with an introductory map of the "locations and wanderings of the aboriginal tribes". It is generally regarded as the first historical atlas of the United States. Half a century later Ellen Eliza Fitz, a governess from New Hampshire working in Saint John, New Brunswick, patented in 1875 a globe mounting that showed the boundary of day and night and the length of twilight for any date; the Fitz globes were made in Boston by Gilman Joslin and sold by Ginn and Heath with her handbook, and survive in some numbers.

The most moving American maps by a woman are five sheets of pencil and ink drawn in the winter of 1828-1829 by Shanawdithit, often described as the last known member of the Beothuk people of Newfoundland, a description that recent scholarship treats with caution. Living in the house of William Cormack, she drew the Exploits River and Red Indian Lake and, on the same sheets, scenes of the encounters between her people and the settlers. Julia Laite, who has studied them in the context of the whole series of drawings, reads several of those scenes as records of violence, while noting that parts of the interpretation remain uncertain. They are at once maps, histories and testimony.

The ocean floor

The twentieth century closes the circle with a map that changed the earth sciences. From 1952 Marie Tharp, a geologist at the Lamont Geological Observatory of Columbia University, plotted the echo-sounding profiles collected on Bruce Heezen's cruises and, not permitted as a woman to sail on the research vessels, drew what the soundings implied. In 1952 she recognised a continuous rift valley running down the crest of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, an observation that Heezen at first dismissed and that became one of the pieces of evidence from which the theory of sea-floor spreading was later built. Their Physiographic Diagram of the Atlantic Ocean appeared in 1957, the South Atlantic in 1961, the Indian Ocean in 1964, and in 1977 the painter Heinrich Berann completed their World Ocean Floor panorama, published by the United States Office of Naval Research with the copyright in Tharp's name. It remains the image most people carry in their heads of what lies under the sea.

Even the humblest map in a London glove compartment has a woman's name on it. Phyllis Pearsall founded the Geographers' Map Company and published the first A to Z Atlas of London in 1936. The legend that she walked three thousand miles to survey the streets herself has been examined by the London historian Peter Berthoud, who found that it does not appear in her own memoir of 1990, which credits her father's firm Geographia and the borough engineers; what stands is the business she built and led for the rest of her life.

What to look for

Almost none of these women signed a map as "cartographer", which is why they slipped out of the histories. They can be found again by reading the small print. On Dutch and French maps of 1700 to 1730 look for "vidua", "veuve" or "weduwe" in the imprint, and check the state of the plate against the standard carto-bibliographies. On Anna Beek's plans look for "A. Beek excudit" or a privilege in her name; plans in the same style were also published by Gaspar de Baillieu and should not be confused with hers. On Rocque's plates the imprint changes from "J. Rocque" to "M. A. Rocque" after 1762, and the same plate can exist in both states. On nineteenth-century British atlas maps "S. Hall" after 1831 is a strong indication of Selina, to be weighed with the date of the geography and the history of the plate. And on the great ocean panoramas of 1977 the copyright line reads "Marie Tharp".

We keep these names in mind when buying, and we welcome enquiries from collectors and institutions who do the same.

Image: Portrait of Gerard Mercator and Jodocus Hondius, engraving, Amsterdam 1613, the opening plate of the Mercator-Hondius atlas. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-1892-A-17310, public domain (CC0).

A note on sources

This is not a scholarly study but a dealer's essay, written to introduce a subject that deserves more attention than it gets and to help collectors read the small print. It rests on the work of others, named in the text where an interpretation is theirs, and listed below by section. Where the evidence is thin or disputed we have tried to say so rather than smooth it over. Corrections and additions are welcome.

Sources

Ende and the Ebstorf map. Girona, Cathedral Archive, Ms. 7 (Girona Beatus), colophon fol. 284, with the descriptions of the manuscript by the Museu d'Història de Girona and the Cathedral of Girona; facsimile and commentary by M. Moleiro Editor; Therese Martin (ed.), Reassessing the Roles of Women as 'Makers' of Medieval Art and Architecture (Leiden 2012); David Woodward, 'Medieval Mappaemundi', in J. B. Harley and David Woodward (eds), The History of Cartography, volume 1 (Chicago 1987). On Ebstorf: Gudrun Pischke, 'The Ebstorf Map: Tradition and Contents of a Medieval Picture of the World', History of Geo- and Space Sciences 5 (2014), pp. 155-161; Armin Wolf, 'The Ebstorf Mappamundi and Gervase of Tilbury: The Controversy Revisited', Imago Mundi 64:1 (2012); Hartmut Kugler (ed.), Die Ebstorfer Weltkarte, 2 volumes (Berlin 2007).

Antwerp and Amsterdam. Joris Van Grieken, Ger Luijten and Jan Van der Stock (eds), Hieronymus Cock: The Renaissance in Print (Leuven and New Haven 2013), and the British Museum's biographical entry for Volcxken Diericx. On Colette van den Keere: Osher Map Library, University of Southern Maine, Women in Cartography, online exhibition curated by Alice Hudson, section I; ECARTICO (Amsterdam Centre for the Study of the Golden Age), entry for Colette van den Keere; Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, description of the Mercator-Hondius Atlas (1606). The attribution of the double portrait to her follows the Osher exhibition; the Rijksmuseum, RP-P-1892-A-17310, catalogues the print as anonymous (a former attribution to Hendrick Hondius was rejected in 1994), published by Jodocus Hondius II, Amsterdam 1613. On Elizabeth Verseyl: Osher, Women in Cartography, section I; Peter van der Krogt, Koeman's Atlantes Neerlandici, new edition (Houten 1997- ), for the Visscher firm; La Scandie, "à Amsterdam chez la veuve de Nicolas Visscher", c. 1716, catalogued under her name by the National Library of Finland. On Amelia 's-Gravesande: RKD Netherlands Institute for Art History, entries for Pieter Mortier and Amelia 's-Gravesande. On Catharina Buijs: Martijn Storms, 'Geheimhouding bij de VOC? De dubbele petten van Blaeu en Van Keulen', Caert-Thresoor 38:1 (2019), and the Amsterdam City Archives.

Anna Beek. Margreet van der Hut, 'Westerstee, Anna van', Digitaal Vrouwenlexicon van Nederland (Huygens Instituut, revised 2014), for the privileges of 1697, 1713 and 1717; Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, 'Anna Beek and the War of the Spanish Succession', Worlds Revealed blog, 25 March 2016, for the desertion of 1693, the divorce, the sixty known maps, the thirty in Washington and the lawsuit of 1713; Library of Congress, A Collection of Plans of Fortifications and Battles, 1684-1709, 3 volumes, call number G1793 .B4 1709, described in the catalogue as containing 117 maps, not all of them by Beek; Paulus Swaen, 'Anna Beek', on the William III sheets; Royal Collection Trust, RCIN 712382 and the military maps at militarymaps.rct.uk; Iris Blokker, Anna Beek (1657-na 1717), Reeks Kaarthistorie (Zwolle: W Books, 2025); Truusje Goedings, Afsetters en meester-afsetters: de kunst van het kleuren 1480-1720 (Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2015), on the colourists' trade.

London and Paris. Peter Heylyn, Cosmographie in Four Books, editions of 1665 and later, with the four continental maps engraved by Robert Vaughan and dated 1663, published for Anne Seile (Cambridge University Library catalogue description of the 1665 edition); Laurence Worms and Ashley Baynton-Williams, British Map Engravers (London 2011), s.v. Vaughan, Seile and Lea; ARGO: American Revolutionary Geographies Online, biography of Mary Ann Rocque, with references to Varley (1948) and Andrews (1967); Massachusetts Historical Society, digital edition of A Set of Plans and Forts in America (1765); on the first edition of 1763, IMCoS Journal 138 (2014); Bodleian Libraries, Map Room blog, 'Where Are All the Women? The Case of the Halls', 6 March 2020, and 'Where Are All the Women Mapmakers? The Case of Selina Hall', The Cartographic Journal 62 (2025); Osher, Women in Cartography, section I, for the Haussard sisters.

America. Emma Willard, A Series of Maps to Willard's History of the United States, or Republic of America (New York 1828; second edition 1829), copy in the Library of Congress, and the Library's research guide 'Women as Mapmakers'; Julie Stoner, 'As the World Turns: Ellen Eliza Fitz and Her Inventive Globe Mount', Library of Congress, Worlds Revealed blog, 4 March 2022; Ellen E. Fitz, Hand-Book of the Terrestrial Globe (Boston 1876); Julia Laite, 'Possible Maps: Newfoundland, 1763-1829', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (2025), on Shanawdithit's drawings.

Tharp and Pearsall. American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives, oral history interview with Marie Tharp (1994-1995) and the AIP essay on the discovery of the rift valley; Hali Felt, Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor (New York 2012); Bruce C. Heezen and Marie Tharp, Physiographic Diagram, Atlantic Ocean, Sheet 1 (Geological Society of America 1957), and World Ocean Floor, painted by Heinrich Berann (United States Office of Naval Research 1977), the original painting in the Library of Congress; Peter Berthoud, 'The Real Story of A-Z Maps by Phyllis Pearsall' (peterberthoud.co.uk), citing Phyllis Pearsall, From Bedsitter to Household Name: The Personal Story of A-Z Maps (Sevenoaks 1990).

General. Alice C. Hudson and Mary McMichael Ritzlin, 'Preliminary Checklist of Pre-Twentieth-Century Women in Cartography', Cartographica 37:3 (2000); Carlyn Osborn, 'Putting Women Back on the Map', Library of Congress, Worlds Revealed blog, 4 March 2016; Christine M. Petto, 'Playing the Feminine Card: Women of the Early Modern Map Trade', Cartographica 44:2 (2009), pp. 67-81; Will C. van den Hoonaard, Map Worlds: A History of Women in Cartography (Waterloo, Ontario, 2013); Judith A. Tyner, Women in American Cartography: An Invisible Social History (Lanham, Maryland, 2020).