The Great Sea: Mediterranean Imaginaries from Antiquity to Modernity

Curated by Myron Groover with Spencer Pope

Exhibition Run: April 1 – August 1, 2025

The Great Sea: Mediterranean Imaginaries from Antiquity to Modernity, is an exhibition of rare books, maps, antiquities, and works of art drawn from the special collections of McMaster University Library and the McMaster Museum of Art. The exhibition explores the human and physical geographies of the Mediterranean from the early centuries BCE to the dawn of modernity, illustrating the complexity, humanity, and paradox embodied by the Mid-Earth Sea.

The Mediterranean Sea occupies a unique place in humanity’s imagination and sense of self. Its civilisations have hewn and transformed our world; its stories haunt our dreams. Its shorelines have shaped societies, languages, and religions. Borne by its currents, ideas and aesthetics have flourished — and foundered. Across its waters, in ceaseless rhythm, necessities and luxuries have been traded, coveted, shipped, and stolen. We are all subject to the tidal pull of its past; inexorably, its future continues to shape ours.

This exhibit, drawn from the special collections of McMaster University Library and the McMaster Museum of Art, will explore human and physical geographies of the Mediterranean from the early centuries BCE to the dawn of modernity. Featuring rare books, maps, antiquities, and works of art drawn from every region of the Mediterranean — including significant recent acquisitions  — it seeks to illustrate the complexity, humanity, and paradox embodied by the Mid-Earth Sea.

Conduit and barrier to interchange, cradle and burial-place of empires, nurturer and devourer of peoples, uniter and divider of continents — through all, changeless and ever-changing, the Great Sea remains.

Click here for more