Mapping Narrations – Narrating Maps

Concepts of the World in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period

Ingrid Baumgärtner, Daniel Gneckow, Anna Hollenbach, Phillip Landgrebe, Daniel Gneckow, Anna Hollenbach, Phillip Landgrebe

• Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781501516047
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Europäische Geschichte des Mittelalters

This volume offers the author's central articles on the medieval and early modern history of cartography for the first time in English translation. A first group of essays gives an overview of medieval cartography and illustrates the methods of cartographers. Another analyzes world maps and travel accounts in relation to mapped spaces. A third examines land surveying, cartographical practices of exploration, and the production of Portolan atlases.

Part I: Visualizing the Known and the Unknown: Representations and Ideas of the World

Chapter 1 The World in Maps: Change and Continuity in the Middle Ages

“THE MAP IS MORE INTERESTING THAN THE TERRITORY.” This is the title given by Michel Houellebecq to an exhibition by his protagonist Jed Martin in the novel La carte et le territoire (The Map and the Territory).¹ The sentence refers to the contrast between a satellite photo and a digitally processed image of a Michelin street map, whose conventional symbols reproduce the space more attractively than the direct but indifferent satellite image. In the competition between the two media, the winner is the drawn network of symbols and meanings, in whose relational interaction the concrete territory comes to life with astonishing clarity. The implication is that the map’s vividness arises not only from its proximity to reality, but from the relationship between the selected contents and their interpretation by the viewer.

Maps are a substantial part of our experience of the present. In the age of online services such as Google Maps and global positioning systems, we are inclined to see them as direct reproductions of a preexisting reality. The images of medieval maps seem to diverge from this; they visualize the earth’s surface in a manner that is quite unfamiliar to us. Within a tiny space, they offer extremely diverse spatial and temporal images of the world, which operate on different levels of reflection. It is easy to see that they are producing an interpretative version of data and knowledge. Moreover, there is no doubt that the purpose of these depictions and their forms of representation are linked to social, cultural, and scholarly contexts.² The complex graphic and rhetorical images reduce religious, ethical, political, and social facts, values, and norms to the essentials through specific codes, without relinquishing more complex connotations. These insights can also be transferred to modern maps, although in less obvious ways: they are densely packed (re)constructions of social orders and ideas. They not only reproduce existing spatial configurations, but also generate new, relationally defined spaces. As Tanja Michalsky aptly puts it, they “create (spatially defined) reality.”³

The aim of this article is to illustrate how geographic spaces were mapped in the Middle Ages, and what changes took place, despite all the continuities. The following reflections presuppose a plurality of medieval cartographic practices and concentrate on representations of the world in its entirety. On the basis of well-known sources, the article will discuss how and in what contexts spatial meanings were generated, and what kind of transitions took place up to the sixteenth century. After a few preliminary methodological considerations, this paper will focus mainly on three different types of map: schematic maps, world maps, and nautical charts,⁴ which will be examined in their respective contexts, be it as part of texts, as stand-alone media, or in the form of atlases.

Preliminary Methodological Considerations

The alterity of medieval maps from today’s perspective inspires curiosity, a factor that makes this type of source attractive for didactic purposes, and especially in skills-based history teaching.⁵ It allows students – with a playful, multimedia approach – to explore different modes of thought, to reflect on their own inescapable connection to a specific place and time, and to develop a capacity for dialogue when seeking to understand contexts other than their own. The divergences from today’s cartographic standards encourage viewers to question their own cultural techniques, expectations, and habits of seeing, to think about the categories used to order and perceive the world, and to scrutinize cultural norms, interests, and dynamics. Maps thus become a multifunctional instrument,⁶ allowing the medieval world to be explored from various perspectives (interdisciplinary or intercultural, method-driven or interpretation-driven), with questions relevant to the present serving as a starting point.

Another point worth noting here is that the history of cartography has undergone substantial development in the last two decades, in both content and methodology. In many cases, however, the more recent insights and approaches within the discipline have not yet made their way into textbooks or history teaching. For example, the common cliché that historical maps present rudimentary medieval knowledge about the earth’s geography and topography, rather than following other paradigms of perception and reproduction, has long since been debunked. Another notion that has proven equally nonsensical is the still-widespread nineteenth-century fabrication that the earth’s spherical shape was unknown in the Middle Ages, and that people lived in fear of tumbling off its edge until the discovery of America by Columbus.⁷ Maps do, however, provide superb demonstrations of the way cultural techniques and practices for describing specific geographical spaces changed over the centuries. In contrast to other eras, the Middle Ages had no uniform cartographical representation of the world, but created a plurality of textual and graphic images, whose messages and objectives were adapted to the given epistemic purpose. Here biblical and religious, astronomical and cosmological, or geographical and physical criteria could prescribe the basic orientation and determine the form.

A glance at the interaction between epistemic interests and representational conventions reveals fundamental changes over the centuries. Greek theorists came close to the idea of a spherical earth anchored in the middle of the solar system, and tried to fathom the principles behind the movement of the spheres. Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth, Marinus of Tyre the latitudes and longitudes, and Claudius Ptolemy the geographical coordinates. This knowledge gradually made its way into the West, where Ptolemy’s Geography, which had been known in the Arab world since the ninth century but was not translated into Latin until 1406, revolutionized cartographic thinking.⁸ The Romans, who focused on the surveying, administration, and control of the Imperium Romanum, drew the orbis terrarum as a flat surface. It should be noted that most ancient maps, such as Ptolemaic maps and the Tabula Peutingeriana, are only preserved in medieval reconstructions and interpretations.

The Middle Ages added further forms of expression concerned with specific kinds of knowledge. As inspired by the Bible, the Christian T-O diagrams and mappae mundi were often oriented towards the east, the location of Paradise, but they also reused elements of pagan culture and encyclopedic material from late antiquity. The zonal or Macrobian maps, mainly north-oriented, were usually small and included in codices. They divided the world into five zones, or the ecumene into seven graduated climate zones, and their purpose was generally to illustrate scientific insights. Regional maps captured individual fragments of the world, with an aspiration to geographical accuracy. Itinerary maps served to show distances and routes. From the twelfth century onwards, nautical or portolan charts, which recorded coastlines and ports, reflected nautical experiences – first of the Mediterranean, and later of the whole world.

The diverging forms and types coexisted in dialogue with one another and with blurred boundaries between them. All claimed to adequately represent tangible reality, though each had its own emphases. Even in the Middle Ages, this diversity must have caused considerable uncertainty, while simultaneously inspiring efforts to develop representational processes that met individual purposes. Even the non-perspectival mode of drawing, which later led to the misinterpretation of one half of a double-hemisphere world map as a disc,⁹ was not new: Crates of Mallus had already tried t...