The geographical lore of the time of the Crusades : $b A study in the history of medieval science and tradition in Western EuropeWright, John Kirtland
History
The geographical lore of the time of the Crusades : $b A study in the history of medieval science and tradition in Western Europe
Wright, John Kirtland
Geography -- History; Geography, Medieval
MAPS OF LAMBERT, GUIDO, HENRY OF MAYENCE, AND OTHERS
In addition to the above, for which we have prototypes from the period
before 1100, there are a number of maps of the world of the twelfth and
early thirteenth centuries, the prototypes of which either have been
lost or never existed. Among the most notable of these is one found in
certain manuscripts of Lambert’s _Liber floridus_.[542] It was compiled
from the usual medieval authorities, Isidore, Orosius, Julius Honorius,
Martianus Capella, Pomponius Mela, Solinus, the _Pseudo-Callisthenes_,
and the Bible, though there also appear upon it a few names that could
have been taken only from contemporary sources. The influence of
Macrobius is most strikingly revealed, for, unlike most other medieval
maps which indicate the known world (Asia, Europe, and Africa) as
occupying the entire area or by far the greater part of the world disk
(as in the Beatus group), Lambert’s map divides the disk along its
diameter by a zone representing the course of the sun and places in the
southern hemisphere an austral continent of magnitude equal to that of
the _oikoumene_.[543]
Guido’s compilation of geographical works, made in 1119, contains in two
manuscripts not only a T-O map but also a map of the world accompanying
a selection from the book of the anonymous Ravenna geographer and a
detailed map of Italy and the surrounding lands. The map of the world is
peculiar because of the enormous area which the Mediterranean occupies.
Miller believes it to be a reduced sketch of a large map of the world
and holds that the detailed map of Italy is a copy of a small portion of
this same original.[544]
A compilation of the _De imagine mundi_, put together by one Henry,
canon of the Church of St. Mary in Mayence, in 1100 and preserved in a
late twelfth-century copy in Cambridge, England, contains a world map
(see below, p. 245, Fig. 6, inset). Though indirectly made from the
sources that the writers of the _De imagine mundi_ and other medieval
cosmographies utilized, it was probably not compiled directly from the
_De imagine mundi_ but rather from a large wall map. Its affinities to
the immense late thirteenth-century world disk in Hereford Cathedral
make it seem possible that both had a common source. In addition to the
older nomenclature, about a dozen more modern place names are to be
found upon it.[545]
A map of the world which somewhat resembles that of Henry of Mayence is
also to be found in two manuscripts of the _Chronica maiora_ (or
_Historia maiora_) of Matthew Paris. Though there are many names that
have come down to modern times, the geography is meager and poor, in
striking contrast to the detail of Matthew’s map of Britain,[546] to
which reference is made below.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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