Matthew Paris and the Cartography of the Margins

Abstract

During the mid-thirteenth century, Matthew Paris produced visual itineraries depicting the route from London to the Holy Land. These maps belong to an exegetical cartographic mode also found in other medieval maps, such as mappaemundi. Rather than serving as practical tools for directing pilgrims to the Holy Land, Matthew's itineraries served as occasions for spiritual pilgrimages carried out within the confines of St. Albans monastery. In contrast to the cartography that emerged during the early modern period, in which nature is conceived as positive and spatially continuous, these exegetical maps treat nature negatively as a space of discontinuity between sites of civilization. Through various cartographic strategies, nature is invoked only to be confined to the margins of medieval pilgrimage. Emptied of meaning, the natural world thus becomes a non-space that allows human interpretation to enter into the cartographic text.