This book is the result of research presented on the occasion of the exhibition « Quand les artistes dessinaient les cartes. Vues et figures de l'espace français, Moyen Âge et Renaissance » (« When Artists Drew Maps : Views and Figures of French Space in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance » (Archives nationales, 2019), which revealed for the first time the magnitude of the corpus of local maps produced in France between 1300 and 1600. The contributions (in English and French) gathered here broaden the scope of its investigation to include local maps produced elsewhere in Europe, so as to suggest the first steps towards a comparative history of these maps, which were a crucial development in the history of cartography..