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2 The Role of Maps in Later Medieval Society:Twelfth to Fourteenth Century

Victoria Morse

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The Middle Ages has been described as a period thatknew little of maps, and indeed the number of sur-viving examples, even if allowances are made for whatwas probably an extremely high rate of loss, do not sug-gest that maps were produced and consumed in particu-larly large numbers between the fifth and fourteenth cen-turies.1 This assessment is reinforced by what we know ofthe physical production of maps, which was limited byhand copying, the use of parchment and other expensivesupports, and the low level of private ownership of, and

of markets for, books and maps until at least the thir-teenth century.2 Nevertheless, the patient examination ofthe surviving evidence of map production and use is be-ginning to suggest that, while maps may not have been ascommonplace at all levels of society during the MiddleAges as they became during subsequent periods or inother cultures, they were important andat least tosome audiencesfamiliar means of expression andcommunication.3

This chapter surveys the many functions of maps inlater medieval culture (roughly the twelfth through thefourteenth century) and some of the key areas of conti-nuity and change between medieval and Renaissance

cartography. A survey of the issues currently under dis-

Makers, Distributors & Consumers (London: British Library, 1996), 2.There is as yet no monographic study of the physical production of me-dieval maps. See the survey and bibliography in Woodward, MedievalMappaemundi, 318 and 32426. The work done on the creation ofthe Hereford map is well summarized in Scott D. Westrem, The Here-ford Map: A Transcription and Translation of the Legends with Com-mentary (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), xviii. The production of portolancharts is better studied; see the discussion and bibliography in TonyCampbell, Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to1500, in HC 1:371463, esp. 390 92. There is a short survey of someof the factors relating to map authorship in Anna-Dorothee von denBrincken, Kartographische Quellen: Welt-, See-, und Regionalkarten

(Turnhout: Brepols, 1988), 5865.3. The number of medieval maps still extant is uncertain, owing to in-complete research and overly restrictive definitions of what might beconsidered a map in earlier catalogs and lists. For example, GautierDalch notes that he has almost doubled the number of world maps re-ported in Marcel Destombes, ed., Mappemondes A.D. 12001500:Catalogue prpar par la Commission des Cartes Anciennes de lUnionGographique Internationale (Amsterdam: N. Israel, 1964); see PatrickGautier Dalch, De la glose la contemplation: Place et fonction de lacarte dans les manuscrits du haut Moyen ge, in Testo e immaginenellalto medioevo, 2 vols. (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sullAltoMedioevo, 1994), 2:693771, esp. 702 and n. 26, where he refers to aninventory of about 400 manuscripts containing one or more maps, asopposed to the 283 manuscripts listed by Destombes. This article hasbeen reprinted in Gographie et culture: La reprsentation de lespacedu VIe au XIIe sicle (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), item VIII. For a morerecent inventory of world maps in the BNF, see his Mappae Mundi an-trieures au XIIIe sicle dans les manuscrits latins de la Bibliothque Na-tionale de France, Scriptorium 52 (1998): 102 62, esp. 1023 and110. Interesting evidence of the familiarity of maps to at least some me-dieval readers is provided by maps drawn into the margins of Sallustshistorical works, presumably by readers who felt that a map ought toaccompany the text; see Evelyn Edson, Mapping Time and Space: HowMedieval Mapmakers Viewed Their World (London: British Library,1997), 20. See also Patrick Gautier Dalch, La Descriptio mappemundi de Hugues de Saint-Victor (Paris: tudes Augustiniennes,1988), 88, on the ability of readers to form mental maps. A telling ex-ample in the shift of attitude among scholars toward the familiarity ofmaps in the Middle Ages is the following comment by Lecoq: Tuckedaway in the secrecy of books or exhibited on the walls of churches, clois-ters, and royal or princely palaces, the image of the earth was displayed

abundantly during the Middle Ages; see Danielle Lecoq, Imagesmdivales du monde, in A la rencontre de Sindbad: La route maritimede la soie (Paris: Muse de la Marine, 1994), 5761, esp. 57. SylviaTomasch argues that by the fourteenth century Geoffrey Chaucer had asophisticated appreciation of contemporary cartography; see MappaeMundi and The Knights Tale: The Geography of Power, the Technol-ogy of Control, in Literature and Technology, ed. Mark L. Greenbergand Lance Schachterle (London: Associated University Presses, 1992),6698, esp. 68.

Abbreviations used in this chapter include: Gographie du monde forMonique Pelletier, ed., Gographie du monde au Moyen ge et la Re-naissance (Paris: ditions du C.T.H.S., 1989), and LMP for R. A. Skel-ton and P. D. A. Harvey, eds., Local Maps and Plans from Medieval En-gland(Oxford: Clarendon, 1986).

1. P. D. A. Harvey, Local and Regional Cartography in Medieval Eu-rope, in HC 1:464 501, esp. 464. See also Harveys comments in hisMedieval Maps: An Introduction, in HC 1:283 85, esp. 283, and hisMedieval Maps (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 7: Mapswere practically unknown in the middle ages. His views on this sub-ject more recently changed: We probably know of only a tiny propor-tion of the world maps produced in thirteenth-century England

(Mappa Mundi: The Hereford World Map [London: British Library,1996], 38). For the likelihood of a high rate of loss, see David Wood-ward, Medieval Mappaemundi, in HC 1:286 370, esp. 292.

2. For the limited ownership of books in the later Middle Ages, seePascale Bourgain, Ldition des manuscrits, in Histoire de lditionfranaise, ed. Henri Martin and Roger Chartier (Paris: Promodis, 198386), 1:4975, esp. 6466 and 7273. For a view that emphasizes thecontinued rarity of the private ownership of maps into the fifteenth cen-tury, see David Woodward, Maps as Prints in the Italian Renaissance:


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cussion by scholars of the period is essential to achievinga balanced understanding of both the innovations of fif-teenth- and sixteenth-century mapmakers and the veryreal continuities that linked their work to that of theirpredecessors. Scholars working on the fourteenth and fif-teenth centuries in particular are suggesting that, in thelater Middle Ages, the production and consumption ofmaps responded to a rapidly changing sense of what a

map could and should portray, a change that still remainsto be fully explored and explained.4 At the same time, ourappreciation of the cartography of the high Middle Agesis becoming more nuanced and subtle with the discoveryof new maps and new texts relevant to their study. Thereassessment of the probable numbers of medieval mapsis just one example of the substantially new understand-ings introduced by recent scholarship. This chapter istherefore designed to describe some current research di-rections, with a particular focus on those that help us bet-ter understand the relationship between the cartographyof the Middle Ages and that of the Renaissance. It doesnot aim to replace the chapters in the first volume of The

History of Cartography; instead it provides updates andcorrections and, more important, focuses the readers at-tentionat the beginning of an extended treatment ofcartography in the Renaissanceon the roots that struckdeep into the soil of the twelfth through the fourteenthcentury.

Although medieval maps often used to be described ascopying a few standard models and repeating a tiredassortment of information drawn from classical and bib-lical sources, it is becoming increasingly clear that they,like all other maps, should instead be understood as toolsfor thinking and as flexible means of communicating

ideas.

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In the Middle Ages, as in other periods, mapscould be shaped and manipulated to meet particularneeds as their authors drew from graphic and textual tra-ditions, from experience, and from their own ideas tocreate individual artifacts suited to given contexts. AsGautier Dalch has emphasized, maps, like other repre-sentations, do not inform us generally about contempo-raries perceptions of space, but rather about the mentaland technical tools available to the mapmaker.6 Medievalmaps must, in short, be approached not as transparentwindows into their creators and users minds but asrhetorically constructed documents belonging to specifictimes and specific contexts. Recent studies have empha-

sized the importance of exploring these contexts, whetherthe specific codicological context of a particular manu-script or the larger social and cultural setting in which themap was conceived, as essential to understanding the fullmeaning of a given map within its society.7

One particularly fruitful aspect of this more contextu-alized and differentiated approach to medieval maps isthe growing awareness of change within the period. In-

stead of a monolithic medieval map, we are now ableto recognize that maps, like other texts and artifacts, havetheir own histories that exist in a complex relationshipwith the cultures that produced them. Recent examples ofattention to change in response to the historical momentrange from the role of the Crusades in the gradual devel-opment of the tendency to locate Jerusalem at the centerof world maps to the increasing sense of English national

identity expressed on the Evesham map during the Hun-dred Years War.8 Likewise, it is now easier to appreciate

26 Setting the Stage

4. See pp. 4451.5. For a further discussion of this attitude, contrasted with the un-

doubted creativity medieval authors brought to the use of ancientsources, see Patrick Gautier Dalch, Un problme dhistoire culturelle:Perception et reprsentation de lespace au Moyen ge, Mdivales 18(1990):5 15, esp. 6 and 1215, and idem,Sur l originalit de la go-graphie mdivale, in Auctor & auctoritas: Invention et conformismedans lcriture mdivale, ed. Michel Zimmermann (Paris: cole desChartes, 2001), 131 43. For the originality possible in maps copiedfrom other sources, see Danielle Lecoqs comments about the maps in

the Liber floridus in La mappemonde du Liber floridus ou la vision dumonde de Lambert de Saint-Omer, Imago Mundi 39 (1987): 949,esp. 9. This is a point emphasized in regard to Lamberts encyclopediamore generally by its most thorough interpreter, Albert Derolez, inLambertus qui librum fecit: Een codicologische studie van de LiberFloridus-autograaf (Gent, Universiteitsbibliotheek, handscrift 92)(Brussels: Paleis der Academin, 1978).

6. Gautier Dalch, Un problme dhistoire culturelle, esp.8. On theT-O maps as ideograms, rather than mimetic representations of space,see Pascal Arnaud, Plurima orbis imago: Lectures conventionelles descartes au Moyen ge, Mdivales 18 (1990): 3351, esp. 5051.

7. See Gautier Dalch, De la glose la contemplation, 698, on theimportance of the codicological context; and Edson, Time and Space,viiviii, for the necessity of studying the maps found in manuscripts inrelation to the surrounding texts. For a fascinating exploration of thesocial and political context of the Hereford map, see Valerie I. J. Flint,The Hereford Map: Its Author(s), Two Scenes and a Border, Trans-actions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 8 (1998): 19 44. Foran appraisal of certain aspects of this interpretation, see Westrem, Here-ford Map, xxiiixxv, esp. n. 22 and n. 28. Victoria Morse, in A Com-plex Terrain: Church, Society, and the Individual in the Works of Opi-cino de Canistris (1296ca. 1354) (Ph.D. diss., University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, 1996), analyzes the personal, intellectual, and spir-itual settings of a series of unusual maps and diagrams from fourteenth-century Avignon. More programmatically, Marcia A. Kupfer suggeststhat a maps meaning was dependent on its context and framework; seeher Medieval World Maps: Embedded Images, Interpretive Frames,Word & Image 10 (1994): 262 88, esp. 264.

8. For the growing tendency to locate Jerusalem at the center of worldmaps in the period 11001300, see Woodward, Medieval Mappae-mundi, 341, and Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken, Jerusalem: A

Historical as Well as an Eschatological Place on the Medieval MappaeMundi, paper presented at the Mappa Mundi Conference, Hereford,England, June 29, 1999. Von den Brincken locates this development af-ter the middle of the thirteenth century, attributing the centrality ofJerusalem to heightened European awareness after the citys reconquestby the Muslims in 1244. On English identity and the Hundred YearsWar, see Peter Barber, The Evesham World Map: A Late Medieval En-glish View of God and the World, Imago Mundi 47 (1995): 1333,esp. 2324.


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the variety of forms of medieval maps, instead of takingthe world map as the archetypal form. The other wide-spread map typesespecially the portolan charts, butalso local, regional, and city mapsare no longer seen asaberrations or precursors of postmedieval developmentbut as contemporary forms of cartographic expressionthat collectively helped define the medieval experience ofmaps.9

This awareness of the changes in the form, content, anduse of maps during the medieval period is particularlyhelpful when we turn to the difficult problem of the tran-sition between medieval and Renaissance cartography.The meaning of the labels medieval and Renaissancehas long been debated, as have the degree and nature ofthe change between the two periods. The tendency in thehistory of cartography to look to the Renaissance for thebirth of modern mapmaking has led to an overemphasisin this field on the discontinuities with the medieval past.The undoubted continuities between the two periods aredismissed as medieval survivals, astonishing to modernobservers for whom the portolan charts of the later

Middle Ages and the Ptolemaic maps of the later fifteenthcentury seem so obviously superior to the zone maps andmappaemundi that continued to be produced.10 More re-cent studies have begun to examine the maps of the tran-sitional fourteenth and fifteenth centuries more carefully,outlining the continuities and attempting to define thechanges that undoubtedly did take place between the me-dieval and early modern periods more precisely at the spe-cific levels of individual artifacts, thinkers, and commu-nities.11 These studies must be compared with recentwork that focuses attitudes toward the representation andcontrol of space in medieval experience, including the de-

velopment of territorial conceptions of legal jurisdictionsand intellectual changes in quantification and measure-ment.12 Only with the careful examination of specific

The Role of Maps in Later Medieval Society: Twelfth to Fourteenth Century 27

11. See in particular the precise and thought-provoking comments onthe new instrumentality of maps in the fifteenth century by GautierDalch in Pour une histoire, esp. 100103. David Woodward arguesthat a notion of an abstract, geometric and homogeneous space layat the heart of fifteenth-century mapping in Maps and the Rational-ization of Geographic Space, in Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Explo-ration, ed. Jay A. Levenson (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art,1991), 8387, esp. 84. Marcia Milanesi sees the change in the explic-itly unitary vision of the known world developed in humanist circlesunder the influence of Ptolemys Geography; see her La rinascita della

geografia dellEuropa, 13501480, in Europa e Mediterraneo tramedioevo e prima et moderna: Losservatorio italiano, ed. SergioGensini (Pisa: Pacini, 1992), 3559. Most recently, Nathalie Boulouxhas suggested that humanist practices of textual criticism led to a newconcern with geographical accuracy and the invention of geography asan independent, and important, field of study in Culture et savoirsgographiques en Italie au XIVe sicle (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002),esp. 193 235.

12. These topics have generated an enormous recent bibliography.Two particularly stimulating studies of changing conceptions of politi-cal space in Italy in the later Middle Ages are Robert Brentano, A NewWorld in a Small Place: Church and Religion in the Diocese of Rieti,11881378 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), and OdileRedon, Lespace dune cit: Sienne et le pays siennois (XIIIeXIVe si-cles) (Rome: cole Franaise de Rome, 1994). See also Daniel Lord

Smails Imaginary Cartographies: Possession and Identity in Late Me-dieval Marseille (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999). On theinteresting developments of the sacred spaces of the ecclesiastical im-munities of Cluny, see Barbara H. Rosenwein, Negotiating Space:Power, Restraint, and Privileges of Immunity in Early Medieval Europe(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), esp. 15683. There areuseful comments on the relative importance of the idea of boundariesand frontiers in the Middle Ages in Patrick Gautier Dalch, De la listea la carte: Limite et frontire dans la gographie et la cartographie deloccident mdival, in Castrum 4: Frontire et peuplement dans lemonde mditerranen au moyen ge (Madrid: Casa de Velzquez,1992), 1931; see also Christine Deluz, Le livre de Jehan de Mande-ville: Une gographie au XIVe sicle (Louvain-la-Neuve: UniversitCatholique de Louvain, 1988), 17273 and 364. There is a large liter-ature, particularly in French, on the perception and description of rurallands: see especially Mathieu Arnoux, Perception et exploitation dunespace forestier: La fort de Breteuil (XIeXVe sicles), Mdivales 18(1990): 1732; Bernard Guidot, ed., Provinces, rgions, terroirs auMoyen ge: De la ralit limaginaire (Nancy: Presses Universitairesde Nancy, 1993); Elisabeth Mornet, ed., Campagnes mdivales:lhomme et son espace: tudes offertes Robert Fossier (Paris: Publica-tions de la Sorbonne, 1995); and the excellent study of the expressionof space in notarial documents by Monique Bourin, Delimitation desparcelles et perception de lespace en Bas-Languedoc aux Xe et XIe si-cles, in Campagnes mdivales: Lhomme et son espace. tudes of-fertes Robert Fossier (Paris: Publications de la Sorbone, 1995), 73-85.See also Jean Coste, Description et dlimitation de lespace rural dansla campagne romaine, in Sources of Social History: Private Acts of theLate Middle Ages, ed. Paolo Brezzi and Egmont Lee (Toronto: PontificalInstitute of Medieval Studies, 1984), 185200, also published in Gli attiprivati nel tardo medioevo: Fonti per la storia sociale, ed. Paolo Brezzi

and Egmont Lee (Rome: Instituto di Studi Romani, 1984), 185200.Changes in ideas of quantity and scale among university-trainedphilosophers are explored in Joel Kaye, Economy and Nature in theFourteenth Century: Money, Market Exchange, and the Emergence ofScientific Thought(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), withimportant consequences for our understanding of quantification and thedevelopment of a geometrical, relational understanding of the world inthe later Middle Ages. Alfred W. Crosbys The Measure of Reality:Quantification and Western Society, 1250 1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge

9. The idea that the portolan charts, in particular, were atypical ofmedieval cartography or somehow precursors of later developments stillappears, surprisingly, in Robert Karrow, Intellectual Foundations ofthe Cartographic Revolution (Ph.D. diss., Loyola University of Chi-cago, 1999), 7 and 53. A good discussion of a local maps connected-ness with contemporary society (in this case disputes over rights) maybe found in Rose Mitchell and David Crook, The Pinchbeck Fen Map:A Fifteenth-Century Map of the Lincolnshire Fenland, Imago Mundi51 (1999): 4050, esp. 40 41 and 4749.

10. Tony Campbells introduction to The Earliest Printed Maps,

14721500 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 14, is astriking example of this tendency. On the continuing importance in thefifteenth century of the world map as a means of obtaining an overviewof the world and its component parts, see Patrick Gautier Dalch, Pourune histoire du regard gographique: Conception et usage de la carte auXVe sicle, Micrologus: Natura, Scienze e Societ Medievali 4 (1996):77103, esp. 92, and idem, Sur l originalit de la gographie mdi-vale, 132. See also Edsons comments on the schematic map in the fif-teenth-century Rudimentum novitiorum in Time and Space, 14.


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cases over time will we begin to see more precisely howthe transition between medieval and Renaissance map-ping took place and to appreciate more fully its roots inthe profound social and cultural transformations of thelater Middle Ages.

The Roles of Maps in the Twelfth

and Thirteenth Centuries

The broad division of medieval map forms into worldmaps, portolan charts, and local and regional maps andplans provides a helpful starting place for a discussion ofthe roles of maps in the later Middle Ages.13 These indi-vidual traditions have in the past been seen as almostcompletely independent of one another, to the point thatsome scholars have suggested that the Middle Ages hadno concept of a map as a category distinct from dia-grams, pictures, and other representations.14 The ideathat there was little cross-fertilization among medievalmaps has become untenable with new discoveries and anew appreciation of the sheer numbers of medieval

maps.15 Nevertheless, the categories remained sufficientlydistinct in many twelfth- and thirteenth-century worksthat they provide a useful framework for discussion.

world maps: forms

Much of the early scholarship on medieval world mapsfocused on creating typologies, some of considerablecomplexity.16 More recently, the tendency has been tosimplify the categories and terminology used to describeworld maps and to explicate the meaning of individualmaps by examining their functions within their specific

contexts rather than by situating them within clearly de-fined families of maps. The most far-reaching revision ofthe typologies of medieval world maps calls for the recog-nition of just two basic types of map: those taking aglobal view of the earth and those focusing only on theoikoumene, or the inhabited world as it was conceptual-ized by late Roman and medieval thinkers, comprising inmodern terms the regions of Europe, north Africa, andAsia, especially Asia Minor.17

A more moderate revision proposed in the first volumeof The History of Cartography would reduce the numberof major types to four: tripartite, zone, quadripartite, andtransitional.18 The first category comprises those maps

that show the inhabited part of the earth as it was con-ceptualized in the Middle Ages, divided implicitly orexplicitly into the three regions of Europe, Africa, andAsia. A subgroup of this category is the T-O map, whichgives a schematic view of the three regions and thewaterwaysthe river Tanais or Don, the Nile, and theMediterranean Seadividing them. The zone map, incontrast, takes a global view of the earth, indicating its di-

vision into five climata or zones defined by temperature,including two cold polar regions, a northern and a south-ern temperate zone, and a hot equatorial zone. Thequadripartite category accommodates maps that combinethe two previous categories, showing the tripartite divi-sion of the known world and the existence of a furtherlandmass south of the equatorial zone. Finally, the tran-sitional category highlights the important developments

of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as world mapsbegan to incorporate material from the portolan chartsand from the newly discovered maps of PtolemysGeography.

This classification is particularly useful in its recog-nition of the transitional maps as a separate and note-


University Press, 1997) includes a discussion of space, but skims tooquickly over the topic to allow for a real understanding of how and whychange took place. For philosophical discussions of space in the MiddleAges, see the articles in Jan A. Aertsen and Andreas Speer, eds., Raum

und Raumvorstellungen im Mittelalter (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1998).For the medieval geographical imagination, especially expressed in lit-erary sources, see Scott D. Westrem, ed., Discovering New Worlds: Es-says on Medieval Exploration and Imagination (New York: Garland,1991), and Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles, eds., Text and Territory:Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages (Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998). Barbara A. Hanawalt andMichal Kobialka, eds., Medieval Practices of Space (Minneapolis: Uni-versity of Minnesota Press, 2000), presents essays from a broad rangeof disciplines.

13. This is the division adopted by the two authoritative surveys ofmedieval maps: HC vol. 1, and von den Brincken, KartographischeQuellen. It derives from Destombes, Mappemondes A.D. 12001500,xvii.

14. For a strong statement of the separateness of medieval map tra-ditions and the lack of a medieval notion of the map, see Harvey, Me-dieval Maps: An Introduction, 28385. There is a useful summary ofmedieval terms for maps in von den Brincken, Kartographische Quellen,2223, and in Woodward, Medieval Mappaemundi, 28788.

15. For a helpful, brief description of the interplay between portolancharts and world maps, see Gautier Dalch, Un problme dhistoireculturelle, 14.

16. Woodward, Medieval Mappaemundi, 29499, gives a briefhistory of classification systems for world maps; see also the discussionin Gautier Dalch, Mappae mundi antrieures au XIIIe sicle,1039.

17. See, for example, Jrg-Geerd Arentzen, Imago mundi carto-graphica: Studien zur Bildlichkeit mittelalterlicher Welt- undkumenekarten unter besonderer Bercksichtigung des Zusammen-wirkens von Text und Bild(Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1984), 125,and Gautier Dalch, De la glose la contemplation, 703. Both au-

thors emphasize the fundamental compatibility of the two views of theearth. The common use of the term continents to refer to Europe,Asia, and Africa on the maps is criticized by Benjamin Braude in TheSons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identi-ties in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, William and MaryQuarterly, 3rd ser., 54 (1997): 103 42, esp. 10910; Braude points outthat, for medieval thinkers, these terms referred to regions of oneworld, not separate continents (p. 109).

18. Woodward, Medieval Mappaemundi, 29599 and 34358.


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worthy category and for its simplification of earlierschemes.19 It has been criticized, however, for its contin-ued use of subcategories named for the authors of certainclassical and late antique texts that, in medieval manu-scripts, were often illustrated by maps (e.g., Isidore,Orosius, or Sallust maps). First, such nomenclaturecan give the misleading impression that the maps in ques-tion originated in the texts with which they are most com-

monly associated or were even the work of the originalauthor.20 This false conclusion obscures the interestingand problematic early history of medieval world maps,only some of which seem to go back to late antique ori-gins, while others were most likely inventions of the earlyMiddle Ages.21 Second, there is abundant evidence that,although maps with certain sets of features might tend tobe copied with certain texts, the associations are far fromrigid or straightforward. Recent research emphasizes in-stead the frequency with which maps migrated from onework to another and the flexibility of medieval copyistsin choosing maps to illustrate given works or in alteringtheir cartographic models at will. The Evesham map, forexample, is very similar to the maps that appear in thechronicle of Ranulf Higden, but it seems to have beenproduced as an independent document, rather than be-ing copied as part of a manuscript.22 Finally, the focus onthe origins of medieval maps tends to obscure the impor-tance of the specific choice that led to the production ofa given map at a given moment and for a given purpose.Even a straightforward copy of an existing map takes ona new range of meaning and a new significance from hav-ing been selected and copied under a particular set ofcircumstances.23

A final issue concerning the forms of world maps is the

question of whether a maps formal structure providesclues to its function. It has been argued that zone mapswere typically used to convey astronomical and astro-logical information, while tripartite maps tended eitherto focus on historical, ethnographical, and spiritualmeanings or (in their more schematic form) to serve as aconvenient icon indicating the earth.24 In part, these as-sociations stem from the assumption that certain maptypes belonged exclusively with certain texts, an ideathat, as we have seen, has been called into question.25

Nevertheless, in spite of the much more fluid relationshipbetween maps and texts that we now know to have beentypical, especially of the later Middle Ages, there does

seem to be some truth to a correlation between form andmeaning. This is best seen in the rather extreme exampleof Opicino de Canistris, who turned to the zone map asthe foundation on which to elaborate his spiritual cos-mography because of the emphasis that this map formplaced on the earth as a part of the larger system of theuniverse, caught at the center of a web of astral forces(fig. 2.1).26

world maps: uses and contexts

The current tendency in the study of medieval worldmaps is to deemphasize questions of origin, descent, or


19. Edson adopted a categorization based on a combination of for-mal characteristics (especially the distinction between T-O and zonemaps) and degree of detail. Although interesting as an attempt to em-phasize the context and purpose of the maps over their formal charac-

teristics, this system seems unlikely to be adopted more generally. Seeher Time and Space, 29.

20. Gautier Dalch, De la glose la contemplation, 7012 andn. 27. Gautier Dalch attributes the continuation of this misleading ap-proach to the influential catalog of medieval maps edited by Destombes,Mappemondes A.D. 1200 1500. For Gautier Dalchs ongoing critiqueof Destombes, see De la glose la contemplation, 699702, andMappae mundi antrieures au XIIIe sicle, 105 8, esp. 107 for theproblem of attributing maps to authors. Edson discusses the problemswith the term Orosian for a category of maps that seldom appear inconjunction with the text of Orosiuss Seven Books of History Againstthe Pagans in Time and Space, 33; her discussion of the complex rela-tionships between texts of Sallusts histories and the maps that often il-lustrated them is also helpful in this regard (pp. 18 21).

21. Gautier Dalch, in De la glose la contemplation, 7068, sug-

gests that the graphic T-O map was an invention of the early MiddleAges, although the concept of a tripartite division of the oikoumene wasof ancient origin. On the other hand, for a helpful discussion of the pos-sible influence of Roman cartography on Matthew Pariss maps ofBritain, see P. D. A. Harvey, Matthew Pariss Maps of Britain, inThir-teenth Century England IV: Proceedings of the Newcastle upon TyneConference 1991, ed. P. R. Cross and S. D. Lloyd (Woodbridge, Suffolk:Boydell, 1992), 109 21, esp. 11114.

22. Gautier Dalch, Mappae mundi antrieures au XIIIe sicle, 107,and Barber, Evesham World Map, 2728. Gautier Dalch argues inhis discussion of Hugh of Saint Victors Descriptio mappe mundi, atext he sees as having been drawn from a map, that in the early twelfthcentury it was possible for a map to be understood as an artifact en-dowed with the authority normally reserved for written texts. See his LaDescriptio mappe mundi (1988), 87115, esp. 107 and 11415. Fi-nally, a subtle and penetrating discussion of the relationship of diagramsto the texts they accompany is in Harry Bober, An Illustrated MedievalSchool-Book of Bedes De Natura Rerum,Journal of the Walters ArtGallery 1920 (195657): 6497, esp. 84 and 88.

23. Thus Woodwards Chronological List of Major Medieval Map-paemundi, A.D. 3001460, which organizes the maps by contentdate, lists Lambert of Saint-Omers maps under the fifth century (at-tributed to Martianus Capella) rather than as products of the intellectualand cultural world of the early twelfth century (for the autograph) or ofthe thirteenth, fourteenth, or fifteenth centuries (for the later copies); seeWoodward, Medieval Mappaemundi, 359 67. On the important in-fluences that the historical context had on Lamberts work, see Derolez,Lambertus qui librum fecit. The Peutinger map is an example of a mapthat has drawn attention almost purely for what it can tell us of late Ro-man cartography, while the circumstances of its preservation throughcopying, probably in the twelfth century, have been little studied. It is to

be hoped that Richard Talberts forthcoming edition and commentarywill shed light on this important issue. See also Patrick Gautier Dalch,La trasmissione medievale e rinascimentale della Tabula Peutingeri-ana, in Tabula Peutingeriana: Le antiche vie del mondo, ed. FrancescoProntera (Florence: Olschki, 2003), 4352, esp. 44 47.

24. Arentzen, in Imago mundi cartographica, 94, basing his argumenton the maps of the Liber floridus.

25. See note 3.26. Morse, Complex Terrain, 23554.


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classification and to look instead at function and context.A sign of the growing maturity of the field, this approachshows that the history of cartography is finding a placewithin the mainstream of medieval cultural history.27 Stu-dents of medieval cartography must bear in mind thatworld maps are multivalent, weaving together variousideas about the world to form unique artistic and culturalstatements. Thus, although it is necessary to try to sort

out the component threads of meaning that make up indi-vidual maps, the task must be undertaken with sensitiv-ity to the categories available within medieval culture aswell as those that modern interpreters find helpful to im-pose on their medieval sources. Although the followingdiscussion will often rely on terms like history or re-ligion to discuss the roles and functions of the maps, itshould be borne in mind that a medieval audience wouldnot have made these distinctions in this way. Indeed, I will

attempt to indicate something of the complexity of thesocial and intellectual frameworks within which mapswere produced and used.28

It is important to situate twelfth- and thirteenth-century mapmaking within a much larger interest in un-derstanding the physical world. This interest arose inmany different areas of high medieval culture, from philo-sophical and scientific efforts to explain the natural laws

underlying the functioning of the universe, to the popu-larity of poetic depictions of the world and its places, tochanges in descriptions of administrative and jurisdic-tional territories.29 The world maps from this period wereinfluenced by these broader concerns, and one of their de-fining characteristics is the very diversity of the purposesthey served and the contexts within which they occurred.

One of the most influential contributions to the studyof medieval cartography has been the idea that worldmaps were intended to describe time as well as space.Since the publication of two highly influential articles byvon den Brincken on the close relationship between uni-versal chroniclesthose that attempted to sum up all of

human history in one workand world maps, it hasbeen widely accepted that one function of these maps wasto give an overview of the world, understood as the the-ater of human, and especially Christian, history.30 As a re-sult of this parallelism between map and chronicle, it is


27. Woodward, in Medieval Mappaemundi, 288 90, discusses thehistoriography of world maps and the growing willingness of scholarsto read these documents on their own terms, rather than as failed at-tempts at providing geometrically accurate representations of places. Seealso Gautier Dalchs comments, Un problme dhistoire culturelle,67.

28. There is a helpful comment on the lack of a medieval concept of

geography in Patrick Gautier Dalch, Le renouvellement de la per-ception et de la reprsentation de lespace au XIIe sicle, in Renovacinintelectual del occidente Europeo (siglo XII) (Pamplona: Gobierno deNavarra, Departamento de Educacin y Cultura, 1998), 169217,esp. 16970. Nicols Wey Gmez emphasizes the importance of ac-cepting and working with the medieval understanding of the disciplinesthat were considered relevant to the study of place, especially astrology,in The Machine of the World: Scholastic Cosmography and the Placeof Native People in the Early Caribbean Colonial Encounter (forth-coming). Natalia Lozovsky dedicates chapter 1 of The Earth Is OurBook: Geographical Knowledge in the Latin West ca. 4001000 (AnnArbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 634, to exploring howgeographical tradition fit into the system of knowledge of the time(p. 6).

29. For a survey of the genres, including maps, that express this pas-sionate discovery of the reality of the world, see Gautier Dalch, Lerenouvellement, 177.

30. See especially Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken, Mappa mundiund Chronographia: Studien zur Imago Mundi des abendlndischenMittelalters, Deutsches Archiv fr die Erforschung des Mittelalters 24(1968): 118 86, esp. 119 23, and idem, . . . Ut Describeretur uni-versus orbis: Zur Universalkartographie des Mittelalters, in Methodenin Wissenschaft und Kunst des Mittelalters, ed. Albert Zimmermann(Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1970), 24978, esp. 24953. There is a briefstatement of her views in her Kartographische Quellen, 32, and inWoodward, Medieval Mappaemundi, 288 90 and n. 22, tracing the

fig. 2.1. ZONE MAP BY OPICINO DE CANISTRIS. Thistransitional map, probably from the 1340s, adopts the rhumblines from a portolan chart as a marker for the Mediterraneanregion of the oikoumene. The habitable zone is surrounded bythe zodiac, emphasizing its temporal nature, and the legendsfor the zones add a spiritual interpretation to the usual geo-graphical information.Photograph Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican City(MS. Pal. Lat. 1993, fol. 9r).


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common to find, rubbing shoulders on world maps, whatone author has called landmarks of the six ages [ofthe world]: ancient cities like Troy and Rome, biblicalevents like the Hebrews crossing of the Red Sea and thelanding of Noahs ark on Mount Ararat, and contempo-rary pilgrimage sites like Santiago de Compostela.31 Thisapproach to these documents has much to recommend itand has played a central role in freeing the study of me-

dieval maps from anachronistic expectations about theirpurpose and content by focusing attention on the needsand attitudes of the culture that produced them. Salvationhistory has, however, become overgeneralized as an ex-planation for the world maps, serving occasionally moreto circumvent than to explore the problem of the mapsmeanings. There are two issues to bear in mind. First, theChristian tradition had a complex idea of history, escha-tology, and the salvational process, and it is essential tounderstand how these issues are being approached in anyparticular map and with what specific meaning.32 Second,the assimilation of human knowledge and activity intothe framework of creation and salvation did not in any

way exclude the lower human meanings, nor was sal-vation history seen as detached from the physical aspectsof the world.33

Within their broad function as representations of spaceand time, world maps could serve a wide variety of morespecific rhetorical needs. One way to explore the func-tions of the world map in medieval society is through themultivalent meanings of the world itself in the learnedculture of the time.34 Part of the curiosity about the phys-ical world that characterized the twelfth-century Renais-sance was the desire to understand the earth as a part ofa system. The concern among philosophers for the

machina universitatis or the machina mundi led them tofocus on the system underlying the universe and the lawsthat governed it. The details of the earth itself (terra, boththe planet and the element earth) were of less interest tothem than the grand mechanism of the world (mundus).Contrasted with this interest in the machina mundi wasthe equally vibrant idea of contemptus mundi (renuncia-tion of the world), which drew on a related but differentdefinition of the world to contrast the ascetic life withthe life of ordinary secular affairs. Secular recalls theterm saeculum that contrasted the world of men and oftime with the eternal world of the Christian God.35 Be-tween these extremes were the views of historians, pil-

grims (whether armchair or actual), and other travelers,for which locations and events on the earth did matterand needed to be recalled.

Many of the medieval world maps that have surviveddo so in the company of other schematic drawings, oftenof a cosmological nature, in computus manuscripts andencyclopedias. A staple of monastic education in the earlyMiddle Ages, computus was the body of knowledge nec-essary to allow the calculation of the dates of the move-


idea of maps as histories back to early work on the Hereford map. Thetheme of maps and history is also developed in Edson, Time and Space,1835 and 97144. On the close connections between time andspaceboth creations and both participating in homologous ways inthe structure of the universesee Danielle Lecoq, Le temps et lin-temporel sur quelques reprsentations mdivales du monde au XIIe etau XIIIe sicles, in Le temps, sa mesure et sa perception au Moyen ge,ed. Bernard Ribmont (Caen: Paradigme, 1992), 11332, esp. 115.

31. Edson, Time and Space, 100. For a description of world maps as

historical aggregations or cumulative inventories of events that occurin space and the suggestion that this approach might be adopted inmodern cartography to more fruitfully represent the historical meaningsof landscape, see David Woodward, Reality, Symbolism, Time, andSpace in Medieval World Maps, Annals of the Association of Ameri-can Geographers 75 (1985): 51021, esp. 51920. A twelfth-centuryexample of the world map as a framework in which information couldbe listed is illustrated in Woodward, Medieval Mappaemundi, 347(fig. 18.53). See also Edsons proposal of a separate category for listmaps in her classification of world maps in Time and Space, 5 6 andfig. 1.3. A sense of places that appeared on world maps can be gainedquickly from the listing in von den Brincken, Mappa mundi undChronographia, 16267, and now from the published legends of theHereford world map in Westrem, Hereford Map. See also the tran-scription of place-names and other names from the Henry of Mainz (or

Sawley) map in Danielle Lecoq, La mappemonde dHenri de Mayenceou limage du monde au XIIe sicle, in Iconographie mdivale: Image,texte, contexte, ed. Gaston Duchet-Suchaux (Paris: Centre National dela Recherche Scientifique, 1990), 155207, esp. 162. For the use of thename Sawley map, see P. D. A. Harvey, The Sawley Map and OtherWorld Maps in Twelfth-Century England, Imago Mundi 49 (1997):33 42, esp. 33.

32. Danielle Lecoq explores the nontemporal meanings of maps like theEbstorf and Psalter maps that seek to express the eternity of divine wis-dom and other related concepts in Le temps et lintemporel, esp. 113.

33. See the suggestive comments in Gautier Dalch, Le renouvelle-ment, 178 and 2045; the author reminds us that descriptions of theworld do not become less interesting just because their primary functionwas to enhance the readers knowledge of biblical history or exegesis(p. 178). A useful comparison from a related discipline is Bernard Rib-

monts remark that the authors of medieval encyclopedias, althoughthey certainly conceived of the world as created, were not particularlyinterested in exploring the final causes of the natural phenomena theystudied; see his Naturae descriptio: Expliquer la nature dans les ency-clopdies du Moyen Age (XIIIe sicle), in De Natura Rerum: tudessur les encyclopdies mdivales (Orlans: Paradigme, 1995), 12949,esp. 130. David Woodward comments on the juxtaposition of spiri-tual and real in Medieval World Maps, in Gographie du monde,78. Compare his lengthier treatment in Medieval Mappaemundi,33437. It is surprising to find Edson still wondering that the collectionof maps and diagrams dealing with astronomical topics in the ArnsteinBible were thought to be religious enough to be bound with a Biblein Time and Space, 94, especially after her extended treatment of com-putus and its relation to clerical culture. See Gautier Dalch, Le re-nouvellement, 207 and n. 82.

34. We know little of what non-elites thought about their world in theMiddle Ages. Interesting evidence of the expectation that a wider audi-ence would have seen a world map appears in the fifteenth century in asermon by Bernardino da Siena in which he asks his listeners to recall Italyas they have seen it nel Lappamondo, referring to the world map inSienaspalazzo pubblico. Cited in Marcia Kupfer, The Lost Wheel Mapof Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Art Bulletin 78 (1996): 286310, esp. 288.

35. Edson, Time and Space, 6263. For the term saeculum, see R. A.Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Au-gustine, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), quo-tation on xxii, and Kupfer, Medieval World Maps, 265.


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able feasts of the Christian year, especially Easter.36

Branching out from the strict calculation of Easter, manycomputus manuscripts compiled other materials relatingto time, the heavens, and theories of the interconnectionsbetween the heavens, the earth, and man that were fun-damental to medieval science and medicine. Many of theexcerpts commonly associated with computus were drawnfrom the works of the Venerable Bede, but the collections

also included classical texts and others by medieval authorson a variety of subjectsincluding historyconnectedwith the idea of time broadly conceived. In addition, theyfrequently contained diagrams designed to summarize andcomplement the textual presentations, and they sometimescontained maps.37 These maps might appear as simple ele-ments of more complex diagrams; this was a common useof the T-O maps, often labeled with the word terra, whichmight signify, for example, the earth at the center of a dia-gram explaining the effect of the moon on the tides.38 Somemanuscripts also included more highly elaborated worldmaps containing historical as well as cosmographical infor-mation. Computus has been convincingly described as an

organizing principle in clerical education, so that, evenafter calculating the date of Easter became a less universallyrequired skill with the development of reliable tables, thesetexts continued to be copied, sometimes in impressivelyproduced manuscripts.39 Knowledge of the information in-cluded in these works played a role in the formation of cler-ical identity and suggests the importance and familiaritythat maps and associated diagrams of earthly and cosmo-logical phenomena would have had among at least someparts of the clerical elite.

Medieval encyclopedias exhibit the same tendency tobring together diverse materials around a loose common

theme of the structure and history of the world. They areone of the most interesting settings in which to study me-dieval representations of the world, because their veryheterogeneity allowed for the inclusion of all sorts of maptypes, from zone and tripartite world maps to regionalmaps and from maps as separately conceived images totiny T-O maps within larger cosmographical diagrams.Despite the diversity of topics and materials that charac-terizes encyclopedias, their larger goal was generally todemonstrate the fundamental unity of the created uni-verse through a synthesis of human knowledge.40 Themaps too can be understood, as has already been noted,as different perspectivesoffering different degrees of

detailon the single, complex, world system.41

The frequent appearance of maps in works designedto serve pedagogical and popularizing functions is an in-dex of the popularity of what one scholar has called thepassionate discovery of the reality of the world thatcharacterized the intellectual movement known as thetwelfth-century Renaissance.42 Scholars sought to under-stand the laws that governed the universal system or

machina universitatis through the development of rea-soned theories and careful speculation about such issuesas the existence of the antipodes, a habitable zone in thesouthern hemisphere diametrically opposite the northernhabitable zone of the oikoumene. This issue in particularwas controversial, because the possibility of a habitable(and possibly inhabited) zone that was completely cut offfrom the known world by an impassable torrid zone

called into question the completeness of the evangeliza-tion of the world and the universality of the Christianmessage.43 The very use of speculative reason to under-


36. There is a summary of the technicalities of computus in Edson,Time and Space, 58 61, and see 5296 on computus more generally. Seealso Arno Borst, The Ordering of Time: From the Ancient Computus tothe Modern Computer, trans. Andrew Winnard (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1993), esp. 3341 and 5064, and Faith Wallis, Imagesof Order in the Medieval Computus, in Ideas of Order in the MiddleAges, ed. Warren Ginsberg (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and EarlyRenaissance Studies, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1990),45 68, esp. 4552. Wallis argues that computus was seen not so much[as] a science through which one studies time as an art by which one im-

poses a rational and human order upon time (p. 51).37. For a sensitive account of the ways in which a diagram mightfunction as a schematic prelude for a textual discussion, highlightingthe relationships among concepts, see Bober, Medieval School-Book,8185, quotation on 83. For maps in computus manuscripts, see Ed-son, Time and Space, 7296.

38. Arentzen, Imago mundi cartographica, 9091, on the symbolicuse of basic T-O maps.

39. Edson, Time and Space, 73, referring to Faith Wallis, MSOxford, St. Johns College 17: A Mediaeval Manuscript in Its Context(Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 1987), 61039. See also Valerie I. J.Flint, World History in the Early Twelfth Century: The Imago Mundiof Honorius Augustodunensis, in The Writing of History in the MiddleAges: Essays Presented to Richard William Southern, ed. R. H. C. Davisand J. M. Wallace-Hadrill (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), 21138,esp. 215, reprinted in Valerie I. J. Flint, Ideas in the Medieval West:Texts and Their Contexts (London: Variorum, 1988), 21138.

40. In the case of the twelfth-century Liber floridus, Danielle Lecoq de-scribes this synthetic vision as a global view of space and time in herLa mappemonde du Liber floridus, 9. Lecoq rightly emphasizes thebeauty of the world that Lambert describes, a beauty still accessible to themodern scholar in the striking illustrations of the autograph and deriving,for a medieval audience, from the strongly symmetrical and hierarchicalstructure of the universe (p.44). See also Margriet Hoogvliet on the moralinterpretation provided by most encyclopedias in her Mappae Mundiand Medieval Encyclopaedias: Image Versus Text, in Pre-Modern Ency-clopaedic Texts: Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Gronin-gen, 1 4 July 1996, ed. Peter Binkley (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 6374,esp. 7273. Flint argues that part of Honorius Augustodunensiss agendain writing the Imago mundi was to channel a contemporary upsurge ofinterest in astrology in directions that were theologically acceptable; see

World History, esp. 22324, 22930, and 23233.41. See p. 28 and note 17.42. Gautier Dalch, Le renouvellement, 177.43. On the focus on laws and a system, see Danielle Lecoq, Limage

de la terre travers les crits scientifiques du XIIe sicle: Une vision cos-mique, une image polmique, in Limage et la science: Actes du 115e

Congrs National des Socits Savantes (Avignon, 1990) (Paris: Edi-tions du Comit des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques, 1992), 1537, esp. 16; see also what Lecoq says about the relative neglect of the


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stand the world was suspect to some, moreover, becauseit seemed to deny the absolute power of God and to priv-ilege a kind of natural determinism at the expense of man-kinds free will.44

The scientific or philosophical approach to the worldwas, then, a controversial one that needed to be justifiedand explained to a potentially hostile audience.45 Curi-ously little has been done as yet to explore the roles of

the maps that frequently illustrated the arguments ofsuch works as William of Conchess Dragmaticon

philosophiae in stating these claims. Instead, Williamsattention to providing helpful visual aids is usually ex-plained as part of a general upswing in the use of visualmaterial to help explain complex problems; the twelfth-century scholars own appreciation of the power of worldmaps to organize information is illustrated by one au-thors choice to classify a randomly ordered list of place-names based on an imagined mappamundi.46

The idea of the earth as a point in a complex system ofnatural forces was developed in the thirteenth century,especially with reference to the influence of the astral bod-

ies on the nature of earthly places. This form of astrolog-ical thought seems to have provided the impetus forRoger Bacons discussion of a figura or drawing showingmajor cities located according to their longitude and lat-itude.47 Bacon has in the past been credited with consid-erable innovations in geographical thought, most partic-ularly in his understanding of the use of coordinates tocreate an accurate graphic representation of the worldsplaces.48 Recent research on the concepts of longitude andlatitude in the Middle Ages suggests that Bacon was lessof an innovator in this respect than previous scholars havethought, since he could draw on a well-established body

of texts and techniques, including translations of Arabicscientific texts and handbooks on the use of the astrolabe,that explained the underlying theory and offered lists ofcoordinates for selected cities. Moreover, he probablyknew of the idea of using the coordinates provided byPtolemys Geography to create a map thanks to the fairlywell-known translations of Maqalah f hayat al-alam(treatise on the configuration of the world) by Ibn al-


rope, ed. Jean-Philippe Genet (Paris: ditions du Centre National de laRecherche Scientifique, 1991), 26375, esp. 275. On the antipodes, seeGautier Dalch, Le renouvellement, 19295; Danielle Lecoq, Au-del des limites de la terre habite: Des les extraordinaires aux terresantipodes (XIeXIIIe sicles), in Terre dcouvrir, terres parcourir:Exploration et connaissance du monde, XIIeXIXe sicles, ed. DanielleLecoq and Antoine Chambard (Paris: LHarmattan, 1998), 15 41,esp. 28 33; and Woodward, Medieval Mappaemundi, 319.

44. Lindberg, Beginnings of Western Science, 200201; Lecoq,Limage de la terre, 3537; and Gautier Dalch, Le renouvelle-

ment, 19293.45. For some of their responses to their critics, see Lecoq, Limage

de la terre, 3537.46. For the use of a mappamundi to order place-names, see Gautier

Dalch, Le renouvellement, 211. On the development in the twelfthcentury of complex images designed to organize and analyze material,see Jean-Claude Schmitt, Les images classificatrices, Bibliothque delcole des Chartes 147 (1989): 311 41, esp. 31213, and John E.Murdoch, Antiquity and the Middle Ages (New York: Scribner, 1984),32864. Barbara Obrist has studied the diagrams of winds that occu-pied an important place in medieval cosmology in her Wind Diagramsand Medieval Cosmology, Speculum 72 (1997): 33 84. An importantintroduction to medieval diagrams is Michael Evanss The Geometryof the Mind, Architectural Association Quarterly 12, no. 4 (1980):3255; see also Lucy Freeman Sandler, The Psalter of Robert de Lisle

in the British Library (London: H. Miller, 1983), and the discussion ofHugh of Saint Victor later in this chapter. For list maps, which pro-vide a graphic framework for lists of names of peoples, see Edson, Timeand Space, 56. In light of this work on visualization, it is hard to agreewith David Woodward that Bacon was unusual for the thirteenth cen-tury [in] his emphasis on the need for pictures and maps in order to vi-sualize the geography of landscapes and places; see David Woodwardwith Herbert M. Howe, Roger Bacon on Geography and Cartogra-phy, in Roger Bacon and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays, ed.Jeremiah Hackett (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997), 199 222, esp. 219.

47. Lindberg articulates clearly an important medieval distinction be-tween astrology as a set of beliefs about physical influence within thecosmos and astrology as the art of casting horoscopes, in Beginningsof Western Science, 274. Wey Gmezs study of the Columbian en-counter and its intellectual background alerts us to the central role of

astrology in providing meaning and context for the study of geographyin scholastic thought; see Wey Gmez, Machine of the World. On theconcept of geographical determinism in Bacon and Albert Magnus,see Woodward with Howe, Roger Bacon on Geography, 21011. Onastrology and geography, see also Patrick Gautier Dalch, Connais-sance et usages gographiques des coordonnes dans le Moyen ge latin(du Vnrable Bde Roger Bacon), in Science antique, science mdi-vale (autour dAvranches 235), ed. Louis Callebat and O. Desbordes(Hildesheim: Olms-Weidmann, 2000), 40136, esp. 43233.

48. David Woodward provides a survey of opinions about Baconsplace in the history of geographical thought in Roger Bacons Terres-trial Coordinate System, Annals of the Association of American Geog-raphers 80 (1990): 10922, esp. 11518, and in Woodward with Howe,Roger Bacon on Geography, 21516 and 22021. Although cau-tious in declaring Bacon an innovator, Woodward goes further in thisdirection than Gautier Dalch, who minimizes Bacons original contri-bution in his Connaissance et usages gographiques des coordonnes,42832. An English translation of the sections of geographical interestin Roger Bacons Opus maius is available online; see Roger Bacon,The Fourth Part of The Opus Maius: Mathematics in The Service ofTheology, trans. Herbert M. Howe (1996) . For a brief but thought pro-voking discussion of Bacons place in the development of English car-tography, see Catherine Delano-Smith and Roger J. P. Kain, EnglishMaps: A History (London: British Library, 1999), 17.

earth itself brought about by this focus on the larger system (p. 30). Seemore generally David C. Lindbergs account of Thierry of Chartres andWilliam of Conches and their interest in natural causation in The Be-ginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philo-sophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 197203. Janet Colemanplaces Thierry of Chartress Tractatus de sex dierum operibus in thecontext of theological interpretation, emphasizing that for Thierry rea-soning about how elements come together and create the world as weknow it, is . . . not the whole abstract truth about creation but rather alimited perspective which requires further interpretation for us to un-derstand it truly. See her Universal History Secundum Physicam et adLitteram in the Twelfth Century, in Lhistoriographie mdivale en Eu-


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Haytham (Alhazen).49 Bacon was thus not unique in hisinterest in locating the places of the world accuratelywithin a system that connected them to the heavens. Thelesser-known (and unillustrated) works of William ofSaint-Cloud and Gerard of Feltre shared an understand-ing of space as a whole composed of a set of rigorouslydefined points, as did the work of the Dominican AlbertMagnus.50 Far from being in itself a trigger that would

revolutionize the medieval understanding of geographicalspace, the knowledge of Ptolemys use of coordinates tomap the features of the world was an accepted part of me-dieval geographical knowledge and was enlisted to rendermore precise an analysis of place based on astronomicaland climatological criteria.

The enthusiasm for knowing the physical world, dis-cussed in the previous sections, played a significant rolein medieval pedagogy, especially in the monastic teachingof the Carolingian and twelfth-century Renaissances.51

This was due in part to the heightened attention given inthe twelfth century to the literal sense of biblical exegesis:understanding the names, places, and history described in

the Bible was seen as the necessary foundation for exam-ining other meanings (moral, Christological, or eschato-logical).52 One of the proponents of this form of monas-tic education was Hugh of Saint Victor, whose work alsoincludes several items important for the history of car-tography. Hugh was sensitive to the role that imagescould play in teaching and learning, and his extant worksincorporate a wide range of visual aids, including tablesand circular diagrams.53 According to his well-known Dearcha noe mystica, he incorporated a world map into theelaborate diagram of Noahs ark that he drew to help hisfellow canons explore the many meanings of this symbol

of the Church and Christian salvation.

54

Recent researchhas also attributed to him a treatise, Descriptio mappemundi, that describes a detailed world map; the text isprobably based on lecture notes from lessons that in-volved the discussion of an actual wall map.55 Althoughthere are no extant maps or diagrams associated with ei-ther text, Hughs interest in maps as representations of thephysical world and as tools for teaching is clear. Indeed,one recent author considers his approach in the De-scriptio mappe mundi revolutionary in its acceptance ofa map, as opposed to a written text, as an authoritativesource of information about the world.56


50. Gautier Dalch, Connaissance et usages gographiques des coor-donnes, 429 34. Gautier Dalch argues in the same article (p. 434and n. 85) that Albert did not envision drawing a map to support hisgeographical discussions. This is against the claims of Jzef Babicz andHeribert M. Nobis, Die Mathematisch-Geographischen und Kar-tographischen Ideen von Albertus Magnus und Ihre Stelle in derGeschichte der Geographie, in Die Klner Universitt im Mittelalter:Geistige Wurzeln und Soziale Wirklichkeit, ed. Albert Zimmermann(Berlin: De Gruyter, 1989), 97110, esp. 103 9.

51. Gautier Dalch, La Descriptio mappe mundi (1988), 12223.

For a broader view of possible pedagogical contexts for the largeworld maps of the thirteenth century, see Marcia Kupfer, MedievalWorld Maps, 26973, and for teaching the laity, see Mary Carruthers,The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images,4001200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 21320.

52. On Hughs place in twelfth-century exegesis, see Beryl Smalley,The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame: University ofNotre Dame Press, 1964), and idem, The Bible in the MedievalSchools, in The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 2, The West fromthe Fathers to the Reformation, ed. G. W. H. Lampe (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1969), 197220, esp. 21620. Hughs discus-sion of the organization of knowledge is available in translation: The Di-dascalicon of Hugh of Saint Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts, trans.Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). See alsoBarbara Obrists comments on the relationship between literal exegesis

and the real world in her review of Gautier Dalchs La Descriptiomappe mundi (1988), in Cahiers de Civilisation Mdivale XeXIIe

sicles 34 (1991): 73. Barbara Obrists Image et prophtie au XII e si-cle: Hugues de Saint-Victor et Joachim de Flore, Mlanges de lcoleFranaise de Rome: Moyen-Age Temps Modernes 98 (1986): 3563,esp. 3941, contains a helpful discussion of Hughs use of images inaiding comprehension and contemplation.

53. Mary Carruthers discusses Hughs use of visual aids in the con-text of memory training; in her view, medieval thinkers privileged mem-ory as key to learning and knowledge, so that book design and teach-ing aids were geared toward efficient memorization of large amounts ofmaterial. This is the context in which she places the attention to visualpresentation of ideas that we have noted as characteristic of this period.See her The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 93, 231, and 25357.

See also Patrice Sicard, Diagrammes mdivaux et exgse visuelle: LeLibellus de formation arche de Hugues de Saint-Victor (Paris: Brepols,1993), 14154, on the idea of visual exegesis. For Hughs use of im-ages to support his contemplative theology, see Grover A. Zinn, Hughof St. Victor, Isaiahs Vision, and De Arca Noe, in The Church and theArts, ed. Diana Wood (Oxford: Published for the Ecclesiastical HistorySociety by Blackwell, 1992), 99116.

54. On Hughs map, see Danielle Lecoq, La Mappemonde du DeArca Noe Mystica de Hugues de Saint-Victor (11281129), in Go-graphie du monde, 931. Sicard provides important context for Hughswork in Diagrammes mdivaux. Carruthers suggests that Hughs trea-tise described a mental picture, not one that was actually drawn; seeCraft of Thought, 243 46, esp. 245 46, and also Kupfer, MedievalWorld Maps, 269.

55. Gautier Dalch, La Descriptio mappe mundi (1988), 4158, forthe attribution to Hugh of Saint Victor, and 1017, for his use of the mapin teaching. See also his Descriptio mappe mundi de Hugues de Saint-Victor: Retractatio et additamenta, in Labbaye parisienne de Saint-Victor au Moyen Age, ed. Jean Longre (Paris: Brepols, 1991), 14379.

56. Gautier Dalch, La Descriptio mappe mundi (1988), 11011:The contribution of the twelfth century, and especially of Hugh ofSaint Victor, was to remove the examination of maps from exclusivelymonastic preoccupations, to give it primacy over the text, and thus toopen the West to one of the intellectual conditions of its expansion(pp. 12627). For the new geographical conclusions that Hugh wasable to derive from his use of the map, see pp. 11315.

49. For knowledge of coordinates in the Middle Ages, including theinfluence of Ptolemys Geography, see Gautier Dalch, Connaissanceet usages gographiques des coordonnes, and esp. 414 15 for the fa-miliarity of these ideas by the second quarter of the twelfth century. Onknowledge of Ptolemy more particularly, see Patrick Gautier Dalch,Le souvenir de la Gographie de Ptolme dans le monde latin mdi-val (VIeXIVe sicles), Euphrosyne 27 (1999): 79106. For Bacons useof Ibn al-Haytham, see Gautier Dalch, Connaissance et usages go-graphiques des coordonnes, 428 29.


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The views of the world expressed by the opponents ofthe new systematic interest in nature in the twelfth andthirteenth centuries can also be found expressed in maps.The world map on the floor of the cathedral of San Salva-tore in Turin has been explained as a demonstration of thevanity of this earthly worldsince it is quite literally trod-den under footin the face of the hope of a future worldexpressed by the decorative program in the upper parts of

the church.57 A more complex example of the representa-tion of the world as the object of renunciation is providedby the twelfth-century world map once in the parishchurch of Chalivoy-Milon. Kupfer has argued persua-sively that this map can only be understood as part of thecomplete program of the churchs decoration, which dra-matized both the history of salvation and the social struc-ture that privileged the monks (the church was amonastic parish) over the laity.58 The world map was lo-cated at the west end of the church, where the lay parish-ioners would see it as they entered, capped, in Kupfers re-construction, with images of the fall of Adam and Eve andthe entry of sin into the world. The map thus functioned

in several coordinated ways: it was part of the overall por-trayal of the historical progression from sin to salvation,expressed in the church building as movement from thewest to the east; it also represented graphically the sepa-ration of the worldly life of the laity from the cloistered lifeof the monks, both to fortify the latter groups prestige andto remind them of its burden and its renunciations. Finally,like the many contemporary maps illustrating the com-mentary on the Apocalypse of Beatus of Liebana, it pre-sented the world as essentially the theater for apostolic,pastoral action.59 Both of these readings of maps in theirmonumental contexts reiterate the importance of the set-

ting in determining meaning, while also alerting us to thepotential range of meanings of any single artifact.As we have already seen in the context of the small

symbolic T-O maps, world maps could also serve politi-cal functions in the Middle Ages. The court of the Plan-tagenet kings of England in the later twelfth century pro-vides a rich example of the interlocking roles ofgeography and cartography in the construction of royalpower. The imperial aims of the Plantagenets, who wereexpanding their power in Ireland and France, coupledwith the strong interest in classical and courtly literatureat their court, resulted in a climate of active interest in ge-ography and maps.60 The artifacts that arose from or

were influenced by this milieu range from illustrationsin manuscripts of works like the Roman dAlexandre(a widely distributed romance detailing the exploits ofAlexander the Great, an obvious model for would-be em-perors) to the description in a poem by Baudri of Bour-gueil of a world map decorating the floor of the chamberof the Countess Adle of Blois.61 This map is generallythought to have been a purely literary conceit, designedto glorify the military triumphs of Adles family line and

to praise her broad knowledge of the cosmos and itsworkings, but it also demonstrates the power of the mapas a symbol of rulership and knowledge and suggests thefamiliarity of such a symbol to the poems audience.62

The political uses of maps seem to have been particu-larly highly developed in thirteenth-century England, al-though examples like al-Idrss Nuzhat al-mushtaqfikhtiraq al-afaq (also known as the Book of Roger),

written for Roger II of Sicily in the twelfth century, andthe lost silver world map associated with it suggest thatthese expressions of royal power and knowledge were em-ployed elsewhere as well.63 Nor was the use of the map asa symbol of humility foreign to political purposes. Aworld map decorated Henry IIIs bedchamber in West-minster Palace as part of a program designed to promote


57. Ernst Kitzinger, World Map and Fortunes Wheel: A MedievalMosaic Floor in Turin, in The Art of Byzantium and the MedievalWest: Selected Studies by Ernst Kitzinger, ed. W. Eugene Kleinbauer(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 32756, esp. 35355.

See also Kupfer, Medieval World Maps, 27576.58. Marcia Kupfer, The Lost Mappamundi at Chalivoy-Milon,

Speculum 66 (1991): 54071, esp. 56571.59. Kupfer, Lost Mappamundi, 566 and 569. For a list of maps il-

lustrating Beatuss Apocalypse commentary, see Woodward, MedievalMappaemundi, 360; note that, although Beatus is listed under theeighth century, many of the manuscripts date from the late eleventh ortwelfth century. For another example of maps (here based on maps fromthe Beatus commentary) as church decoration, see Serafn Moralejo, Elmapa de la dispora apostlica en San Pedro de Rocas: Notas para suinterpretacin y filiacin en la tradicin cartogrfica de los Beatos,Compostellanum: Revista de la Archidiocesis de Santiago deCompostela 31 (1986): 31540.

60. Nathalie Bouloux, Les usages de la gographie la cour desPlantagents dans la seconde moiti du XIIe sicle, Mdivales 24

(1993): 131 48; see especially the world map as symbol of royal powerand the idea that a king should possess geographical knowledge of theregions he ruled, pp. 144 48; on the relations of clerics to royal ad-ministration and geographical writing, see pp. 136 43. See also RobertBartlett, Gerald of Wales, 1146 1223 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982).David J. Corner suggests a Welsh origin for the strong interest in topog-raphy in twelfth- and thirteenth-century English writers from GiraldusCambrensis to Matthew Paris; see his English Cartography in the Thir-teenth Century: The Intellectual Context, Bulletin of the Society ofUniversity Cartographers 17 (1984): 6573.

61. For the Roman dAlexandre and other romances with geograph-ical content, see Bouloux, Les usages de la gographie, 13739;Bouloux sees geography as a topic of considerable interest to the audi-ences of romances. See also Alan Deyermond, Building a World:Geography and Cosmology in Castilian Literature of the Early Thir-teenth Century, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/RevueCanadienne de Littrature Compare (1996): 14159, esp. 14653.

62. Bouloux, Les usages de la gographie, 145, n. 53; Kupfer, Me-dieval World Maps, 277; and Carruthers, Craft of Thought, 21320.

63. For al-Idrs s role at Rogers court and his geographical works,see S. Maqbul Ahmad, Cartography of al-Sharf al-Idrs, in HC 2.1:15674, esp. 158 60. Like Henry II, Roger wished that he should ac-curately know the details of his land and master them with a definiteknowledge (p. 159 and n. 26). A book on the Ebstorf map that I havenot been able to consult is Jrgen Wilke, Die Ebstorfer Weltkarte (Biele-feld: Verlag fr Regionalgeschichte, 2001).


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the virtues of a Christian kingship, especially charity andthe controlled use of power.64

At a more local scale, a recent interpretation of theHereford map emphasizes its role in the ecclesiasticalpolitics of canonization, the enforcement of ecclesiasticalrights against the lay aristocracy, and relations betweenroyal and episcopal power.65 According to this view, themap catered in many of its details to aristocratic lay

pilgrims, joining to its political message the equally im-portant function of providing entertainment and moralimprovement: its representations of animals and mon-strous races engage the popular aristocratic spiritualityembodied in the bestiaries, while at the same time pro-viding a kind of geographical entertainment familiar fromcontemporary romances.66

In conclusion, the surviving examples of world maps,along with other texts, images, and references to maps,bear witness to the passionate interest in the real worlddescribed by Gautier Dalch.67 The variety of functionsthat these maps could play reflects the multifarious mean-ings of the world in medieval culture, as the maps served

to describe, analyze, summarize, and create knowledgeand perceptions about the fundamental spaces of humanexistence. These were works destined for both elite andsomewhat more popular audiencesincluding pilgrims,parishioners, and consumers of romancesto whomthey helped provide visual, intellectual, and imaginativeaccess to the larger world. As we have seen, the sensitiv-ity of recent scholarship to the specific contexts in whichmaps appeared and the ways in which they were used hasgiven us new insights into the complexity and subtlety ofthe potential meanings of medieval world maps, althoughmuch remains to be uncovered about the perception and

representation of space in this fertile period.

portolan charts

Treatments of medieval mapmaking still occasionallyimply that the portolan chartsremarkably accuratecharts of the coasts of the Mediterranean and Black seaswith part of the Atlantic coast of Europewere an aber-ration on the medieval scene.68 This view has recently be-come even less sustainable with the suggestion that thelater thirteenth-century date most commonly proposedfor their origins be pushed back by a hundred years.69

Geographically accurate and intendedat least in part

for the purpose of route finding, the portolan charts re-flected a different set of assumptions and expectationsabout the purpose of a map than did contemporary worldmaps: nevertheless, room must be found in our view ofmedieval cartography for these fascinating and problem-atic inventions.

Much of the history of the portolan charts belongs inthe later part of this chapter, because most of the extant


Another example of royal patronage of geography is Gervase ofTilburys Otia imperialia (1211), written for the German EmperorOtto IV; Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia: Recreation for an Em-peror, ed. and trans. S. E. Banks and J. W. Binns (Oxford: Clarendon,

2002). The text includes a reference to an accompanying map; see Ed-son, Time and Space, 132. The Ebstorf map (now lost) draws in part onthis text, although the relationship between the two works remains de-batable. The map has been interpreted as, in part, a political documentassociated with the reign of Otto the Child, Duke of Brunswick, becausethe place-names focus heavily on his familys possessions; see ArminWolf, News on the Ebstorf Map: Date, Origin, Authorship, in Go-graphie du monde, 5168, esp. 5361.

64. A painted world map also decorated the great hall at WinchesterCastle, here in company with an image of fortunes wheel, recalling, likethe floor of San Salvatore in Turin, the transitoriness of earthly power;see Kupfer, Medieval World Maps, 27779.

65. Flint, Hereford Map. For criticism of her identification of themaps author, see Westrem, Hereford Map, xxiii and n. 23. The map ofEurope contained in a manuscript of works by Giraldus Cambrensis

(Dublin, National Library of Ireland, MS. 700) has also been interpretedas a statement about ecclesiastical politics, here the centrality of Rometo the functioning of the English church; see Thomas OLoughlin, AnEarly Thirteenth-Century Map in Dublin: A Window into the World ofGiraldus Cambrensis, Imago Mundi 51 (1999): 2438, esp. 2831.

66. On pilgrimage and the literary context of the Hereford map, seeJocelyn Wogan-Browne, Reading the World: The Hereford MappaMundi, Parergon n.s. 9, no. 1 (1991): 11735, esp. 132 35. ValerieFlint developed these ideas in a talk entitled Maps and the Laity: TheHereford Mappa Mundi, at the conference Maps from the MiddleAges, University of Minnesota, November 14, 1998.

67. Gautier Dalch, Le renouvellement, 177.68. Scott Westrem comments that the familiarity to the modern eye

of maps used by navigators . . . may be deceptive, causing us to see themonly as precursors of the realistic cartography of today, thus distract-ing us from some of their essential medieval qualities; see HerefordMap, xxxviii n. 60. Even Campbell refers to portolan charts as preco-cious in their precision, although elsewhere he describes them as anecessary if specialized element of medieval life; see Portolan Charts,371 and 446.

69.Campbell, in PortolanCharts,provides a reliablesurveyof thesemaps; on their origins and methods of compilation, see pp. 380 90.More recently, and on the basis of new evidence, Patrick Gautier Dalchargues for a twelfth-century date in his Carte marine et portulan au XIIe

sicle: Le Liber de existencia riveriarum et forma maris nostri mediter-ranei (Pise, circa 1200) (Rome: cole Franaise de Rome, 1995), 137.For further discussion, see later in this chapter. Gautier Dalch also of-fers further evidence for the existence in the twelfth century of por-tolanswritten sailing directions, as opposed to the maps convention-ally called portolan charts in Englishin his Dune technique uneculture: Carte nautique et portulan au XIIe et au XIIIe sicle, in Luomo

e il mare nella civilt occidentale: Da Ulisse a Cristoforo Colombo(Genoa: Societ Ligure di Storia Patria, 1992), 283312, esp. 28797.On the complex terminology of these maps, which Gautier Dalchprefers to call cartes marines, see Campbell, Portolan Charts, 375,and Gautier Dalch, Carte marine, xxi.

70. The earliest surviving dated chart is from 1311; two undatedcharts, the so-called Carte Pisane and the Cortona chart, are oftenthought to be earlier, dating perhaps from the end of the thirteenth cen-tury; see Campbell, Portolan Charts, 404. Textual references to charts

examples come from the fourteenth century and later, asdoes the first clear evidence of their impact on other mapforms.70 It is worth pausing, nonetheless, to consider


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what the twelfth- and thirteenth-century evidence can tellus about the reception of the geographical knowledgerepresented by these charts.

The very earliest evidence that we have of the existenceof both portolans and portolan charts stems, not surpris-ingly, from the intersection between learned culture and thepractices of Mediterranean trade and seafaring. In the caseof written sailing directions, the first traces appear not in

local sources, but in the chronicles of northern Europeancrusaders and pilgrims, for whom Mediterranean naviga-tion was a foreign world and who borrowed from por-tolans as a helpful framework for writing about unknowncoasts and seas.71 In contrast, the Liber de existencia rive-riarum et forma maris nostri Mediterranei, the firstknown work to be based in part on what may have been aportolan chart, was an entirely Italian undertaking, but,like the works just mentioned, the product of a mixture ofinformation and ideas from both learned and practicalknowledge spheres. The text we have indicates that the au-thor began by creating a map, which he later supplementedwith the text in response to a demand for more historicaland learned material by a member of the local clergy.72

Both of these examples give early evidence of an inter-dependence of learned and practical cultures and of thecross-fertilization of ideas from cultural communities usu-ally taken as distinct in the Middle Ages.73 This creative in-teraction of types of knowledge has been seen as key in Re-naissance developments, while, conversely, the separation ofmedieval knowledge communities has been seen as a limi-tation on creativity and innovation.74 Spheres of knowl-edge did in fact remain quite distinct, but these examplessuggest several settings in which contact could occur: theintensely self-conscious world of the nascent Italian com-

munes, heavily influenced by merchant culture and open toany means of expressing civic consciousness; and the Cru-sades, with their mass movement of northerners out oftheir habitual intellectual and physical territories into astrange new Mediterranean world. As far as we now know,the interdependence of map, portolan, and learned geo-graphical text that underlies the Liber was not replicateduntil the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, al-though new discoveries (like the Liber itself) have beenfrequent enough in recent years to justify a healthy skepti-cism about the extent of our knowledge in these areas.75

Nevertheless, the examples that do exist suggest that in cer-tain circumstances fruitful exchanges could and did occur.

regional maps

Compared with the numbers of extant world maps, rela-tively few maps of smaller areasregions, cities, estates,or routessurvive from the high Middle Ages. Onceagain, however, a number of new examples have recentlycome to light, suggesting the possibility that our percep-

tion of this type of medieval cartography may yet be dra-matically altered by further discoveries.76 It remains true,however, that many functions accomplished in other


predate the extant examples: the earliest and most famous records theuse in 1270 of a chart by the crew of a ship bound for Damietta to tryto calm the fears of King Louis IX of France and his fellow crusadersduring a storm. See Campbell, Portolan Charts, 439; Patrick GautierDalch, Les savoirs gographiques en Mditerrane chrtienne (XIIIe

s.), Micrologus: Natura, Scienze e Societ Medievali 2 (1994): 7599,esp. 83 84; and idem, Dune technique une culture, 3078, discusssome of the more problematic aspects of this episode.

71. Gautier Dalch, Dune technique une culture, 28796,esp. 296, on the novelty of the experience of the crusade for writers andparticipants and the emphasis on the voyage itself as a key part of theundertaking.

72. Gautier Dalch, Carte marine, 716. See the review by TonyCampbell in Imago Mundi 49 (1997): 184; Campbell is skeptical aboutGautier Dalchs identification of this map as a portolan chart or proto-portolan chart.

73. This evidence is corroborated by the available information on theearly use and ownership of portolan charts. In addition to pilots andmerchants, as we might anticipate, notaries were relatively strongly rep-resented among owners of these charts. Patrick Gautier Dalch suggests

that they used them to aid in drawing up contracts involving far-flungtrading ventures that required a specific and accurate understanding ofMediterranean, Black Sea, and Atlantic coastal geography. He is alsoconcerned to note the mixed evidence for the actual nature of shipboardusage of these charts. See his Lusage des cartes marines aux XIVe etXVe sicles, in Spazi, tempi, misure e percorsi nellEuropa del bas-somedioevo (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sullAlto Medioevo,1996), 97128, esp. 109 and 11324, respectively. Compare Campbell,Portolan Charts, 439 44, where the author states that the evidencethat portolan charts were used on board ship is overwhelming, butwho is similarly cautious about the role of the charts in navigation(p. 439). There are also interesting connections between the role of por-tolan charts as markers of participation in a community of men whogained their livelihood in connection with the sea, an element of displaythat has something in common with the later importance of maps asprints in the more highly commercialized world of the sixteenth century.See Woodward, Maps as Prints, 25 and 75102, and Gautier Dalch,Dune technique une culture, 311.

74. For boundaries between medieval communities of knowledge, seeGautier Dalch, Un problme dhistoire culturelle, 12. For ideas ofcross-fertilization from the Renaissance itself, see the example ofBenedetto Cotrugli, who explained the desirability for merchantsof learning both the liberal arts and practical disciplines in his Dellamercatura et del mercante perfetto of 1458 (cited in Gautier Dalch,Lusage des cartes marines, 111).

75. For other examples, see the articles by Gautier Dalch mentionedin note 111, and Bouloux, Culture. For Gautier Dalch, the contact be-tween portolans and portolan charts and the learned world would haveoccurred early and been relatively extensive; see his Lusage des cartesmarines, 109.

76. Harvey surveys the field in his Local and Regional Cartogra-

phy, discussing the numbers and familiarity of these maps (pp. 46465) and the possibility of further discoveries (pp. 48687). See also hisThe History of Topographical Maps: Symbols, Pictures and Surveys(London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), and, more recently, the helpfulbook by Delano-Smith and Kain, English Maps, 8 and 1218, esp. 12for increasing numbers of maps generally in the twelfth century and thefirst local maps of England. Von den Brincken, KartographischeQuellen, 42 46, offers a discussion of categories using a different ter-minology than that adopted here.


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periods by means of a map (the description of landed pos-sessions, for example) were most often handled in theMiddle Ages through written lists and descriptions. TheDomesday Book in England and countless inventories ofthe lands of monasteries were purely textual documents,while boundaries were typically indicated in charters bysuch written means as listing the names of the holders ofneighboring parcels.77 The few known exceptions come

from England, including an early thirteenth-centurysketch map of the divisions of a meadow, in which thedrawing replaces a textual description of th

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