What is RUTTER?

We are an international and multidisciplinary team of scholars writing a narrative of the scaling up of a scientific description of the earth in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We draw straight from the lived experience of travelling and observing the earth on long-distance sea voyages. This means that, as a preliminary task, we are engaged in the systematic search, identification and classification of the information contained in early modern Iberian rutters and ship’s logbooks—an enormous, fascinating and understudied corpus scattered through libraries and nautical institutions. This will be followed by extensive transdisciplinary work to improve radically our knowledge on the formation of global concepts about the earth: what was the historical process that brought us to them?

More prosaically, RUTTER is the name of the ERC-financed Project started in September 2019: “RUTTER — Making the Earth Global: Early Modern Rutters and the Construction of a Global Concept of the Earth” (ERC Advanced Grant 8334381; IR: Henrique Leitão, Faculdade de Ciências, University of Lisbon).