Marcia Kupfer

The Latin term mappa mundi designates a world picture that adapted the cosmographical inheritance of Greco-Roman antiquity to Western medieval epistemology. It might encompass the entire terrestrial globe theorized in relation to the celestial sphere, extend only to the horizons of human habitation, the oikumene, or combine both schemas. These alternative frames of reference coexisted and interacted. Developed along multiple lines in diverse contexts between the seventh and fifteenth centuries, the mappa mundi might take the form of either textual description or graphic object, and, if the latter, range from simple geometric figure to dense pictorial composition. The mappa mundi in its various representational modes epitomized the Creation—sometimes emblematically by reducing physical, or human, geography to a compact, iconic sign, sometimes cartographically by integrating times and places within an elaborated matrix of word and image.
 
My project links to a book under contract with the London press Reaktion Books. The study ties the mappa mundi qua genre into several overlapping fields: (i) scientific learning (the liberal arts curriculum and calendrical computation in the early Middle Ages, natural philosophy in the Scholastic era); (ii) religious doctrine and devotion (scriptural exegesis, theology, evangelical mission, preaching, pilgrimage); (iii) political thought (ecclesial dominion, royal power, princely virtue, civic pride); (iv) the birth of the travel romance (a genre in which marvels combine with ethnographic description); (v) visual art (manuscript illumination, monumental pictorial ensembles).
 
In the first part of the book, I treat the mappa mundi as a laboratory for investigating the value-laden spatialization of knowledge in medieval societies. Here the mappa mundi is a formal engine that visually processes the order of things past, present and future. I turn in the second part of the book to the genre’s alliance with artistic programs, literary conceits, and ritual practices. Here I explore how the mappa mundi crystallizes a mental template that is further consolidated and propagated through cultural production. The arc from world into map and from map back into world allows me to draw out the ways in which the genre mediated between conceptualization and habitus. The broad scope, highly synthetic treatment and original methodology will distinguish this study from previous discussions of the material.