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Medieval world maps in nineteenth-century facsimile
A mappa mundi is a world map drawn in a medieval manuscript. The originals are bound into books in a handful of libraries; what circulates in print is the work of nineteenth-century scholars who copied them plate by plate. The maps in this collection come from two such atlases: Konrad Miller’s Mappaemundi: Die ältesten Weltkarten, published in Stuttgart in six parts between 1895 and 1898, with an atlas of 16 collotype plates, and Jomard’s Monuments de la géographie, issued in parts in Paris from 1842 to 1862.
What is here
- The Beatus map known as Paris II (Miller, plate 2) and the Turin Beatus (plate 8): world maps from manuscripts of the Commentary on the Apocalypse by Beatus of Liébana. The History of Cartography traces the large Beatus maps, “of which fourteen survive”, to a lost prototype of 776–86.
- The Jerome maps of Asia (plate 11) and of Palestine (plate 12), drawn about 1150 on the two sides of the last leaf of a manuscript of Saint Jerome’s works (British Library, Add MS 10049), with east at the top. Miller thought they were Jerome’s own work; Paul Harvey later disproved this.
- The Sawley map (plate 13), an English world map of about 1190, the first image in a manuscript of the Imago Mundi now at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
- A mappa mundi from Leipzig in Jomard’s facsimile, east at the top, with Rome, Troy and Sallust’s peoples of Africa.
Each sheet is a scan of a real plate in a named archive, restored at 300 dpi; nothing is redrawn. Printed world maps from the age of exploration onward are in Antique World Maps.