ABSTRACT
Shaping worlds and worldviews, maps are moral projects at heart. They create visual links between interior and exterior worlds. Nowhere are these links more explicit than in allegorical maps of life. While metaphors such as navigatio or peregrinatio vitae and their associated vivid topographic imagery reach all the way back to classical and late antiquity, they started to assume cartographic contours only in early modern times and flourished in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the increased professionalisation of map production. This chapter takes allegorical maps of life and of its regions as a starting point for reflecting on the meaning of cartography as a humanity, that is, as a field of study, an approach to knowledge and an expression of what makes us human.
