Celticity: Migration or Fashion?
The definition of the Celts and Celtic is at the core of Celtic Studies, either in antiquity or the early medieval period.
500 year old map of ‘America’ discovered in Munich
A previously unknown version of Martin Waldseemüller’s famous world map has been disocvered in the collections of the University Library in Munich.
Innse Gall: Culture and Environment on a Norse Frontier in the Scottish Western Isles
The title of this paper encapsulates a central problem to be faced when looking at the notion of a frontier zone in the islands which fringe western mainland Scotland. It asks if the region was a „Norse frontier‟, yet the territorial designation of the kingdom which encompassed most of the maritime zone from Lewis in the north to Man in the south is given in its medieval Gaelic form.
When Did Historical Atlases Really Originate?
Renaissance geography began in the early 1400s with the translation from Greek and dissemination among scholars of the Geographia or Cosmographia by the second-century Alexandrian scientist Claudius Ptolemy.
Tree rings hint at environmental triggers for settlement change
Tree ring dates for buildings and archaeological structures have been accumulating for several decades. It is possible to interrogate not just the master oak chronologies but the start and end dates of populations of timbers to provide pictures of human activity across Ireland.
Mapping Metageographies: The Cartographic Invention of Italy and the Mediterranean
This article discusses the emergence of Italy as a discrete object in the Mediterranean in the history of Western cartography. In particular, it focuses on different coexisting Renaissance mapping traditions that rested on two opposed spatial understandings and experiences of the basin
Exploring Byzantine Cartographies: Ancient Science, Christian Cosmology, and Geopolitics in Imperial-Era Mapping
Dr. Papadopoulos will explain how the study of Byzantine maps illuminate how Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean people understood themselves, their belief systems, and their political positionality in territorial terms.
Paradise in Africa: The History of a Geographical Myth from its Origins in Medieval Thought to its Gradual Demise in Early Modern Europe
Where was Paradise to be found? In this regard, a considerable number of different locations have been proposed.
Making a Mappamundi: The Hereford Map
Produced some seven hundred years ago, a large map of the world that is housed today in the cathedral at Hereford, on the English border with Wales, is a great encyclopedia of knowledge imprinted and illustrated on a single page, but a page that measures over five feet long running vertically down the middle and almost four-and-one-half feet horizontally.
Bluffs, Bays and Pools in the medieval Liffey at Dublin
This paper examines these deviations and seeks their origin in the bluffs, bays and pools of the river in medieval times.
“Surat Bahr al Rum” (Picture of the Sea of Byzantium): Possible Meanings Underlying the Forms
In this paper I will display, examine, and deconstruct the ‘classical’ medieval Islamic conception of the Mediterranean as seen through colorful, miniature maps found in medieval Arabic and Persian geographical manuscripts from the 11th to 17th centuries.
Al-Idrisi and His World Map (1154)
Working for eighteen years under the patronage of the Norman King Roger II Guiscard of Sicily, who gathered scholars from many regions at his court in Palermo, the Moroccan geographer Al-Idrīsī in 1154 completed a description and an atlas of maps of the known world.
Fra Mauro’s world map (c. 1448-1459): mapping, mediation and the Indian Ocean world in the early Renaissance
Begun around 1448 and completed some time before 1459, Fra Mauro’s World map, illustrated in the figure accompanying this article, is a beautiful object.
The Power of Disembodied Imagination: Perspective’s Role in Cartography
The Renaissance flowering of cartographic activity following rediscovery of Ptolemy’s formulae for map projection is well documented, as are connections between this rediscovery and the oceanic expeditions subsequently undertaken during ‘The Age of Discovery’
Mapping Malaria in Anglo-Saxon England
England once looked very different. Much of southern Britain was marshland for most of the island’s occupied history. These bogs, fens, and marshes ensured that areas of virtual wilderness persisted from before Roman Britain through the Norman period and beyond.
The Medieval and Renaissance Transmission of the Tabula Peutingeriana
Some time ago close correspondences were discovered between the content of the Tabula and a very unusual text composed in the eighth century, the Cosmographia of the Anonymous of Ravenna.
The concept of territory in the late Anglo-Saxon and early Medieval cult of Saints in England
The Cult of Saints, the practice of venerating holy figures and their relics, and the events that surround such worship, was widespread in Anglo-Saxon and Medieval England.
River navigation in Medieval England
The significance of Medieval water transport lay in its low cost, for carriage by land could be more than ten times the price of transport by water; indicating the price differential was as great, if not greater, than during the industrial revolution.
More Vinland maps and texts. Discovering the New World in Higden’s Polychronicon
This present essay seeks to contribute to the debates over the early mapping of America by investigating the possibility that the Vinland Map (regardless of authenticity) is not the sole visual representation of Norse America, and certainly not the earliest. Rather, the earliest surviving maps of America appear to be a series of T–O derivative maps produced roughly 150 years before the voyages of Columbus as illustrations to Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon.
That country beyond the Humber”: the English North, regionalism, and the negotiation of nation in medieval English literature
The English North is “Not London” but is “before Scotland,” a strangely liminal space between the familiar
South and those undesirables north of the River Tweed.
The Woodland Economy of Kent, 1066-1348
At the time of Domesday Book a great part of the county, perhaps a third, or even more, was tree clad, and while by the thirteenth century the proportion had fallen.