A Critical Companion to English Mappae Mundi of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries

Abstract

This strong collection of eleven essays combines the known facts about the principal global maps to survive from the late Middle Ages with new research and insights about them. As the title suggests, it is both a “companion” that covers the bases for those who may not be as familiar with the subject of medieval maps, and it is also “critical” in that it introduces fresh ideas about each map it includes. It contains ten color plates and thirty black and white figures on bright white semigloss paper that makes for great clarity, albeit within the smaller dimensions of the book format.Dan Terkla provides an introductory overview of scholarship on maps of the era and the various critical approaches to them. Then in the first main chapter, Michelle P. Brown submits a comprehensive chronology of maps, including their sources in manuscript and artistic cultures. Terkla then proffers two essays on the “geospatial awareness” (p. 45) of the residents of the major Benedictine house of Glastonbury Abbey in the mid tenth to late eleventh centuries and of several figures at or near Durham Cathedral Priory in the Anglo-Norman era. These discussions bring readers up to the first dated map from the book's chosen period, and each chapter thereafter largely focuses on one map each: the Munich Map, the Sawley Map, the Vercelli Map, one in Matthew Paris's Chronica majora, the Psalter Map, the Duchy of Cornwall fragment, and the famous Hereford Map. The final essay by Helen Davies and Gregory Hepworth describes the advantages of recent digital processes for examining manuscripts and the projects that so far have analyzed maps.Instead of a summary of the chapters, which would be challenging given the amount of information contained in each, I here draw attention to some main thematic points that emerge from the anthology. First, the scope of the subject matter becomes clear. The total of all Western mappae mundi to survive from the period ca. 700–1350 is approximately 197, and the total of all from the book's period 1100–1350 is 116 (p. 69). This is not a particularly large number, depending on how you look at it, but the book shows a “geospatial awareness” based on map-owning institutions that extended across England from Durham in the North to the South, Hereford and Glastonbury in the West, to Canterbury in the East.Asa Simon Mittman lays out the most common current ways of studying maps and the approaches the book's authors take: to (1) . . . consider the layout of the map and its contents in the wider context of European Christian mapmaking; (2) pull the map into wider conversations about book history, manufacture and use; (3) perform close visual analyses of details and close readings of inscriptions—first and foremost, by observing the original object(s), rather than standard reproductions, and by relying on advanced imagining technologies, including those from the Lazarus Project; (4) engage in readings based on new materialist, postcolonial, gender and monster studies and/or hybrids of these approaches. (p. 139)He also advocates against trying “to reconstruct the map on which the intervening centuries have taken their toll” and instead urges scholars to consider the “meaning” of the damage that has come in the intervening years (pp. 145–46).What was the purpose of maps, and how did they function? Here there appears to be some remaining disagreement. Nathalie Bouloux, along with others in the volume, draws on Hugh of St. Victor's textbook on geography, the Descriptio mappe mundi (ca. 1128), to show that despite a sense of this world being of less value, a map was nevertheless considered “a representation of the real, useful in the geographical organization of the world,” and again, “a depiction of the real.” The geography of the time “focuses on . . . an objective, concrete awareness of space” (p. 105). Bouloux cites as an example Gervase of Tilbury, who in the early thirteenth century criticized cartographers for being unreliable. Their maps contain “inconsistencies,” “errors,” and made-up elements (p. 107). This sense of accuracy is complicated of course, but a “reality effect” is a tendency that remains, especially in more detailed maps like the lost Ebstorf Map (ca. 1234/1300) or the Hereford Map (ca. 1300). On the other hand, Daniel K. Connolly, comparing a Matthew Paris map (ca. 1250) with two other lesser-known maps also produced at the abbey of St. Albans, Hertfordshire, says generally of maps that they did not seek a “true” representation of the earth but rather worked “to express a truth about reality that best responded to the demands of the circumstances in which [mapmakers] worked” (p. 152). In the case of Matthew's map, this meant a square map, perhaps to fit into the confines of the page, and “a highly edited and distilled presentation of parts of the world, one clearly focused upon the triangular shape of western Europe” (p. 154). Terkla summarizes that maps and geography books were used “for personal study; to assuage . . . geographical curiosity; for contemplation, meditation and absorption; for teaching and for combinations of these activities” (p. 45).This tension between inclinations toward reality versus other map functions is also taken up in analyses of the Hereford map. Davies and Hepworth's discussion of spectral imaging emphasizes that, given the large size of the map (over five feet high and four feet wide) and the high-resolution presentation of it on the Hereford Cathedral website (available at http://www.themappamundi.co.uk/), “the user's eye travels among . . . individual points of interest” and “the interface creates a sense of motion, thereby enhancing the user's sense of the space depicted on the map” (pp. 255–56). In contrast, Marcia Kupfer's analysis of the Hereford map underlines a god's-eye point of view. The map is enclosed within a ring inscribed with M-O-R-S (DEATH), but outside that ring at the top of the map is Christ, so that even though the earth depicted in the Hereford map is subject to death, mortality is in turn “vanquished by resurrection” (p. 238).In addition to questions of perspective, many essays discuss the mapmaker's (or makers’) roles. Again, Terkla summarizes that “The mapmaker takes information stored in visual memory, books and other maps, then epitomizes, shapes and inscribes it onto a new map. The mapmaker is the nexus of information translation from various sources and media, the maker of new and cultural memories that are transferred again and again in various media to myriad people across time” (p. 58).Questions about purposes inevitably lead to thoughts about sources, and a particular strength of all the essays in the Critical Companion is their consideration of manuscript and historical context. Nearly all the essays include analysis of map sources, whether those sources were other maps or written materials or both, even though “Precise genealogies for medieval maps are notoriously difficult to establish” (Hiatt, p. 123). In terms of the relationship between a map and its context, the essays consider codicological settings but also other locations in which maps are found, for example, the winged case in which the Hereford Map formerly resided. Bouloux's examination of the Munich Map (ca. 1130) provides an example of a complicated relationship between map and written text. The color map (also on the cover of the Critical Companion) measures about 10.5 inches high by 10 inches wide. Like many of the authors in the volume, Bouloux draws on Patrick Gautier Dalché’s pioneering work to summarize that the map derives from a mural at the abbey of St. Victor, Paris, which the famous Hugh of St. Victor may have made himself and which he describes in Descriptio mappe mundi. The mural is now lost along with the abbey. However, the mural-based map does not illustrate Hugh's treatise; instead, it appears in Book XIV, “De Terra et Partibus,” of Isidore of Seville's Etymologies, a common source for conceptions of the world (and a book of the Etymologies that frequently includes a map). The same person who wrote the place names on the map wrote the surrounding text. That is, the scribe took the Victorine illumination from the mural, greatly reducing its size, and put it within Isidore's encyclopedia. The map complements Isidore's material without merely illustrating it. The program therefore “reflects real intent on the part of the person in charge of the manuscript's fabrication” (p. 94) and shows just one of several ways that visual and written media can accompany each other without being sources for each other. Readers of the Munich manuscript therefore have two presentations of the world from different sources for comparison and contrast, one pictorial and one written.The volume as a whole accepts the term mappa mundi to designate each map in it and, as is common, Terkla points out in his introduction that the word mappa is “complicated” whereas mundi “is straightforward enough” (p. xvi). Perhaps we can, however, quibble about that term mundi. Except for quadripartite maps and zonal maps, the majority of the surviving maps display only or overwhelmingly the northern hemisphere or oecumene (oecumene/ecumene also a commonly used term but itself a nineteenth-century borrowing, meaning “inhabited.”) To substitute mundi for the North seems a conflation. There's a possibility that this confusion reiterates the idea that some other peoples do not inhabit their lands, and the blurring of the oecumene with mundi might today be read as northern power over the Global South.The only fault in the book is the index. Although maps are largely covered one per chapter, they also receive substantive analysis and cross-references in other chapters. The index is therefore less than helpful because it does not have entries on all the maps discussed and is otherwise inadequate. Someone looking for information, for example, on the Psalter Map will consult Chet Van Duzer's chapter but may overlook the discussion of the map in Michelle Brown's chapter. The Hereford, Vercelli, and later Gough maps receive some attention in the last chapter, but the index does not refer to the discussions adequately or at all.Bouloux writes that “maps are profoundly polysemous, which means that, like other cultural artifacts, they could serve purposes unforeseen by their creators” (p. 111). The Critical Companion is an essential text for those wishing to learn more about the multifaceted maps and to venture into unexpected worlds.