The Virtual Reality of the Anglo-SaxonMappamundi*

Abstract

Reading the eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon mappamundi– the oldest such English map surviving – as a form of a virtual world more analogous to the digital environment of virtual reality than physical geography can reveal much about this famous map's cultural mechanics and meaning. As more than simply a measurement of the world known to Anglo-Saxon England, the Cotton Map charts a number of struggles between the twin realities of England's marginal locus in the historical record of the known physical world, and of the Anglo-Saxons’ impulse to recentre the world on their own island. In light of this tension, this article studies the formal and textual elements of the Cotton Map in relation to Christian theographic traditions of medieval mappaemundi, classical representations of early Britain, the formation of Anglo-Saxon identity, and the geopolitical context of eleventh-century England. Applying recent theories on the function of digital virtuality in the representation and construction of reality to this study shows in turn how this map virtually fashions a particular form of Anglo-Saxon reality – one driven by a geographic desire for a future not spent on the edge of the world.