Mapping Espionage in the Early Modern Siegescape

Professor Carolyn Yerkes, "Mapping Espionage in the Early Modern Siegescape":

Art and architectural historians usually interpret the military revolutions of the seventeenth century through two signal inventions, the cannon and the bastion. The story goes that advent of heavy artillery in western warfare heralded a technological call-and-response that reshaped urban space. Curiously absent from this narrative is the parallel story about how humans were used and ultimately depicted as part of a mechanized fighting force. This paper recuperates the neglected genre of the spy map in order to trace what the foot soldiers depicted within these embattled drawings reveal about the reshaping of the Dutch landscape.