ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book argues that the central role in the construction of the region as an entity, political, social, and cultural has been played by images, and in particular by maps, travel illustrations, press cartoons, as well as more recently, by the covers of academic publications. A major recurring issue was the power of visual technologies, which determined the dissemination of maps and body images. The manuscript maps of Sarmatia Europea could have been known to only a handful of humanists and their patrons. Travel images oscillate between the exercise in primary visualisation, a record of ‘rarely or not at all to be met with’, to use the words of the scientist Edward Brown, but they also subscribe to well-established visual discourses, repeating the same trope again and again, as in the case of Hildenbrand’s photographs of eastern European peasantry for the National Geographic.
