Medieval Cartographies: Christianizing the Orbis Terrarum

FAIN: FB-54184-09

Marcia Ann Kupfer
Unaffiliated Independent Scholar (Washington, DC 20015)

This book explores intersections between cartography and allied modes of representing space in the Middle Ages. Maps, monumental artistic programs, and ritual trajectories such as pilgrimages and itinerant liturgies constitute concomitant, mutually informative articulations of a self-consistent spatial order. On the model of recent historical inquiry into visuality, my study attends to a culturally-specific matrix of images, discourses and practices through which medieval spatiality comes into focus. Between the late eighth and fifteenth centuries, cartography significantly extended interest in geography as a branch of cosmology on the one hand and history on the other. In so doing, mapping made visible the concerted transformation of the orbis terrarum into an orbis christianus in the Western European imaginary. On account of the unique ways in which maps distill spatial ideation, they enable us to apprehend symbolic figurations actualized in art and ritual.

Associated Products

The Jerusalem Effect: Rethinking the Centre in Medieval World Maps (Book Section)
Title: The Jerusalem Effect: Rethinking the Centre in Medieval World Maps
Author: Marcia Kupfer
Editor: Bianca Kühnel
Editor: Galit Noga-Banai
Editor: Hanna Vorholt
Abstract: An article on the centrality of Jerusalem in medieval world maps
Year: 2014
Publisher: Brepols
Book Title: Visual Constructs of Jerusalem
ISBN: 9782503551043

Reflections in the Ebstorf Map: cartography, theology and dilectio speculationis (Book Section)
Title: Reflections in the Ebstorf Map: cartography, theology and dilectio speculationis
Author: Marcia Kupfer
Editor: Keith D. Lilley
Abstract: Study of the Ebstorf Map
Year: 2013
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Book Title: Mapping Medieval Geographies. Cartography and Geographical Thought in the Latin West and Beyond: 300–1600
ISBN: 978-1-107-0369

The Noachide Dispersion in English Mappae Mundi ca. 960-ca. 1130 (Article)
Title: The Noachide Dispersion in English Mappae Mundi ca. 960-ca. 1130
Author: Marcia Kupfer
Abstract: analysis of maps in computus manuscripts
Year: 2013
Primary URL: http://peregrinations.kenyon.edu/vol4_1/KupferPeregrinations41.pdf
Primary URL Description: pdf
Access Model: online journal
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Peregrinations: Journal of Medieval Art and Architecture

Art and Optics in the Hereford Map: an English Mappa Mundi c. 1300 (Book)
Title: Art and Optics in the Hereford Map: an English Mappa Mundi c. 1300
Author: Marcia Kupfer
Abstract: book on Hereford map
Year: 2016
Primary URL: http://yalebooks.com/book/9780300220339/art-and-optics-hereford-map
Primary URL Description: catalogue description
Publisher: Yale University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780300220339
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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