The Cartographic Fool by Mike Sauter

Join us for an evening of insight and conversation with the author Michael Sauter himself as he discusses the release of his new book.

The Cartographic Fool uncovers the story of the “Fool’s Cap Map,” an engraving published ca. 1595 in Antwerp. Placing the engraving in northern Europe during the Wars of Religion, the book identifies the image’s maker, Philips Galle, restores its title, Nosce Te Ipsum (“Know Thyself”), and explains its motifs as a brief Catholic response to the Reformed Church’s embrace of global maps. It will interest scholars of print, visual culture, and cartography.

Michael J. Sauter is Associate Professor of History at the University of Suffolk, where he studies early modern Europe and colonial Latin America. He is the author of Visions of the Enlightenment: The Edict on Religion of 1788 and Political Reaction in Prussia, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, vol. 177 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), The Spatial Reformation: Euclid Between Man, Cosmos and God (Philadelphia, Penn.: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), European Thought and Culture, 1350-1992: Burdens of Knowing (London and New York: Routledge, 2021), and The Cartographic Fool: Cartography, Religion and Visual Culture in Renaissance Europe (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2026). His current research project, Forging Global Minds: Libraries and Natural Knowledge in Colonial Latin America, is funded by a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust

Doors will open at 5.30pm for a 6.00pm start. There will be refreshments available in the Waterfront Foyer before and afterwards. The event will last for approximately one hour and will include a Q&A session.