On England’s Green and Pleasant Land: Matthew Paris’s Map of Britain as a Reflection of the Levant

Abstract

In the mid-thirteenth century, the noted English Benedictine chronicler Matthew Paris produced a substantial corpus of regional maps. Especially famous is Paris’s Map of Britain, particularly the version preserved in British Library Cotton Claudius d. vi, known for its mimetic accuracy, artistic presentation, and striking level of detail. Another of Paris’s maps, however, a map of the eastern Mediterranean preserved on Oxford Corpus Christi MS 2*, though little studied, shares many of the features which made the Map of Britain so remarkable. Internal evidence strongly suggests that the Oxford Map and the Claudius Map of Britain derive from a common project which depicted England and the Holy Land as mirror images – a project which would have had profound meaning in the contemporary political context, serving to express horror at Jerusalem’s fall in 1244, articulate support for a new English-led crusade, and comment critically on King Henry III’s performative piety. The subsequent abandonment of the project is equally informative since it demonstrates that medieval maps, far from being formulaic expressions of set religious doctrine, could express political opinions so intensely topical that they could become outdated before they were even complete.