Maps and Travel in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period

Knowledge, Imagination, and Visual Culture

Ingrid Baumgärtner, Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby, Katrin Kogman-Appel

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783110587418
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The volume discusses the world as it was known in the Medieval and Early Modern periods, focusing on projects concerned with mapping as a conceptual and artistic practice, with visual representations of space, and with destinations of real and fictive travel. Maps were often taken as straightforward, objective configurations. However, they expose deeply subjective frameworks with social, political, and economic significance. Travel narratives, whether illustrated or not, can address similar frameworks. Whereas travelled space is often adventurous, and speaking of hardship, strange encounters and danger, city portraits tell a tale of civilized life and civic pride. The book seeks to address the multiple ways in which maps and travel literature conceive of the world, communicate a 'Weltbild', depict space, and/or define knowledge.

The volume challenges academic boundaries in the study of cartography by exploring the links between mapmaking and artistic practices. The contributions discuss individual mapmakers, authors of travelogues, mapmaking as an artistic practice, the relationship between travel literature and mapmaking, illustration in travel literature, and imagination in depictions of newly explored worlds.

Part I: Historical Space

Marcia Kupfer

Traveling the Mappa Mundi: Readerly Transport from Cassiodorus to Petrarch

Marcia Kupfer, Independent Scholar, 3611 Patterson Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20015, [email protected]

Abstract: Authors from Cassiodorus to Petrarch associate maps with travel as a mental activity. This essay explores the history of the topos and how it is figured on three world maps of c. 1300.

Keywords: Cotton (Anglo-Saxon) world map, Duchy of Cornwall fragment, Ebstorf world map, Hereford world map, Honorius Augustodunensis, Hugh of St. Victor, Isidore of Seville, mappa mundi, Petrarch, pilgrimage, Priscian, travel

Writing to the papal secretary Francesco Bruni in 1367–1368, Petrarch recalled the dueling desires of his much younger self.27 On the one hand, he yearned to travel the world. But on the other, he also wanted to stay put, immersed in his books. A tiny map helped him resolve the conundrum:

Of course, I have seen more by traveling than I would have seen at home, and I have added something to my experience and knowledge of things, but I have diminished my knowledge of literature. Think how many days of study these comings and goings have taken from me so that, upon seeing my little library again, I would feel like a stranger […] This is no small loss, considering the brevity and flight of time. Had this fear not possessed me and checked my impulses […] I would have gone to the ends of the earth, to China and the Indies, and visited the most distant land of Taprobane. […] At that age no labor of the road, no hardships at sea, no perils would have frightened me; it was the loss of time and wasting of my mind that frightened me, figuring that I would return full of the sights of cities and rivers, mountains, and forests [plenum spectaculis urbium, fluminumque ac montium et sylvarum], but not nourished by the dear books that up to that time I had collected with youthful zeal […] Therefore I decided not to travel just once on a very long journey by ship or horse or on foot to those lands, but many times on a tiny map [per breuissimam chartam], with books and the imagination, so that in the course of an hour I could go to those shores and return as many times as I liked, to those distant shores, not only unscathed, but unwearied too, not only with sound body, but with no wear and tear to my shoes, untouched by briars, stones, mud, and dust.28

The cartographic stimulus to imaginary travel had become a topos well before the fourteenth century. Indeed, Petrarch’s subordination of travel experience to literary nourishment is consistent with an age-old investment in book-learning as the primary purpose of geographic knowledge. Eschewing the distraction of sensory overload (the sights of things, which also covers also sounds and smells), Petrarch favors the readerly activity that had long attended the contemplative approach to maps. Virtual travel, I argue, is fundamental to the medieval consumption of maps. Recent scholarship has emphasized the compensatory visual role of cartographic images in support of spiritual pilgrimage by the cloistered, whose religious vows prevented excursion to shrines beyond convent walls.29 Where churches had mappae mundi installed for public display, the backdrop of the orbis terrarum might well have allowed the laity to translate veneration at their local shrines into an analogue of Holy Land pilgrimage.30 Rather than pursue the importance of cartographic images to such devotional practices, however, my remarks go in a different direction. I consider, first, how authors invoke the rhetorical equation between map reading and touring the world and, second, how cartographic artifacts themselves deploy it.

Reading as Iter

Monastic assent to journeys in spirit via cartographic and literary transport had taken its cue already in the sixth century from Cassiodorus. He called on the monks of his foundation at Vivarium to gain “some notion of cosmography, in order that you may clearly know in what part of the world the individual places about which you read in the sacred books are located” (Institutiones 1.25). After directing them to a short text (libellus) by Julius Orator (Julius Honorius, fourth or fifth century) and a map (pinax) associated with the ‘Periegesis’ of Dionysius of Alexandria, he famously recommended:

Then, if a noble concern for knowledge has set you on fire, you have the work [codex] of Ptolemy, who has described all places so clearly that you judge him to have been practically a resident in all regions, and as a result you, who are located in one spot as is seemly for monks, traverse in your minds [animo percurratis] that which the travel of others has assembled with very great labor.31

The earliest extant Ptolemaic maps occur in deluxe Byzantine manuscripts commissioned c. 1300, following the discovery c. 1295/96 of the lost ‘Geography’ by the monk and scholar Maximos Planudes. Recent philological analysis suggests that the Byzantine edition, including the maps, depends on an exemplar dating from the fifth/sixth century.32 It is not impossible that the codex to which Cassiodorus referred had maps on which to feast the eyes.

From the early Middle Ages, the material production of knowledge ensured the adaptation of cartographic images to monastic culture. Maps became an integral part of different cosmographical traditions useful for religious instruction and communal life. T-O and zonal schema served demonstrative and pedagogical functions in relation to the Isidorian ‘encyclopedic’ or computistical texts with which they circulated. More pictorially elaborated tableaux offered a meditative potential. By the second half of the eighth century, the codex format mobilized detailed maps to comport with the ancient philosophical and literary tradition of the cosmic vision. Gregory the Great had already Christianized the topos in his life of Saint Benedict.33 The abbot’s rapturous soul, dilated in divine light, had attained the “God’s-eye” view of a minuscule world gathered up in the compass of a sunbeam (Dialogi 2.35). Full-page images and double-page spreads of the orbis terrarum stage the transcendent elevation above a miniature creation upon which the visionary casts a detached gaze.

While the reader’s position relative to the open book simulates the vantage point of an imaginary celestial/aerial prospect, the body’s size relative to the map concomitantly parallels the soul’s dilation. Looking out upon a scene from afar and high above the fray defines the essence of speculation. In compilations bringing together histories and spiritual teachings with cosmographical extracts, from astronomical and calendrical materials to geographical descriptions, a map encapsulated the world under divine governance. A fortiori in manuscripts of the Commentary on the Apocalypse by Beatus of Liébana, a prefatory world map models for readers Saint John’s ascent to the Enthroned One (Rev. 4:1). Through the scope of its apostolic geography, the map portrays the ecumenical church in the present age, to which the tribulations heralding the Second Coming figuratively pertain.

Worldly learning and the meditative exercise of speculation converge in an Anglo-Saxon miscellany of the first half of the eleventh century (London, British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius B.v.1), attributed either to Winchester or Christ Church, Canterbury. The manuscript, with texts in Latin and Old English, comprises a richly illustrated cycle of the ‘Marvels of the East’; calendrical materials including illustrations of the Labors of the Months; many computistical texts including Aelfric’s ‘De temporibus anni’; chronological lists of popes, emperors, Anglo-Saxon bishops, Anglo-Saxon regnal lists and genealogies; an account of pilgrimage to Rome undertaken by Archbishop Sigeric of Canterbury and the stations he visited; a full-page zonal map; a star map (lost); a prayer to the Holy Trinity; an illustrated ‘Aratea’ as translated by Cicero with scholia; other astronomical selections; the ‘De laude crucis’ of Rabanus Maurus (lost); and Priscian’s Latin version of Dionysius’s ‘Periegesis’. The whole anthology originally ended with a full-page world map (Fig. 1), moved when the volume was rearranged in the early seventeenth century so that it now precedes the ‘Periegesis’.34

Fig. 1: Anglo-Saxon world map, first half of the eleventh century; London, BL, Cotton MS Tiberius B.V, fol. 56v. © British Library Board.

The compilation bears on both the spatial order of mundus (heavens, earth, ecumene, the marvels of the eastern hinterland, the way from ‘here’ at the northwest corner to Rome at the center), and the temporal dynamics of saeculum (annual cycles of work and prayer, histories of empire, church, and realm). The local assumes a place on the world stage, geographically and chronologically. The Trinity and the cross lie behind the cosmogonic architecture of creation. Far from extraneous insertions in the volume, the oration to the former acknowledges the eternal triune being of God while the praise of the latter pays homage to the instrument of Christ’s passion and vehicle of human salvation.

Even as the Cotton world map promotes visualization, it reveals its dependence on linguistic structures that govern the verbal practices of speech, writing, and reading. A rubric at the head of Priscian’s rendition of the ‘Periegesis’ announces a mappam aptam, but the cartographic image does not derive its formal disposition or nomenclature from the poem.35 Indeed, the map cannot be said to illustrate any particular geographic text.36 By the same token, however, Martin Foys has astutely observed a remarkable relation between two sets of legends in Asia and syntax proper to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Maps and Travel: An Introduction
• Part I: Historical Space
• Part II: Use and Reception
• Part III: Travel into Sacred Spaces
• Part IV: Word and Images
• Index of Toponyms and Locations
• Index of Historical, Religious and Mythological Figures
• Index of Modern Authors