The Centre for Early Modern Visual Culture offers research collections focused primarily on illustrations, engravings, and maps published in books between 1400 and 1900. Our researchers examine critical questions about visuality from this period, questions that continue to impact how we see the world around us today. These inquiries revolve around gender, race, class, place of origin, and how images become powerfully technologized in the present era. Scholars of the digital humanities, history, art history, and literature will find these collections particularly useful for their research.

This website is meant as a user-friendly portal to the CAIRN database, which contains 22,000 images. Each image links to its corresponding image collection, where the relevant metadata generated by researchers at the CEMVC lab is housed. We hope that this tool will facilitate visual research on marginalized voices, including those of women and Indigenous populations.

Site visitors are invited to browse our collections in CAIRN, and on this website, examine their source documents in the form of scanned PDF copies of the thousands of books from which the illustrations have been curated, as well as peruse our publications. As this website launches, we continue to link more collections housed in CAIRN to this website; check back regularly to see what we have been up to.