| This dissertation examines medieval literary and visual expressions of cosmological and cartographical anthropomorphism, and suggests some of the ways in which recognition of the pervasive anthropomorphic dimensions of medieval map-making affects our understanding of medieval space, gender and production. Medieval cartography both records and disseminates the ideological and theological construct that links images of the human body with those of the world. Map-makers in the Middle Ages were less interested in the objective geography of the earth than in Christian self-definition and self-creation that subordinated geographical relationships to the greater relationship between God, man, and the world. In other words, the idea of the mundus, or "the state or condition of the world," was separate from that of the orbis, or "the shape of the earth and its relation to other heavenly objects." Significantly, the medieval word for a map is mappamundi, which alerts us to the fact that the world depicted on these maps is a product of desire.;Chapter One discusses gendered space in the middle ages, drawing from a wide variety of sources to show that cartography, cosmology and biology are linked in significant ways throughout the period. Chapter Two examines the manner in which medieval Creation miniatures establish a cosmography that is intimately anthropomorphic by linking human procreativity to divine gestures of creation. The connection between anatomy and cosmography forged in the first and second chapters finds its cartographical statement in the Hereford mappamundi, the subject of Chapter Three. This map reflects a concern with the moral valences attendant upon anthropomorphism. What does it mean to figure the world as a human body, or specifically, the female body? The Hereford mappamundi rests with posing these questions, but finding the answer obsesses the fourteenth-century cartographer, Opicinus de Canistris, whose work blurs the distinction between imaginative model and geographical reality, disabling the boundaries between the personal and the locational. As these chapters will demonstrate, medieval cartography can refine our understanding of medieval aesthetic, political, religious and social knowledge and attitudes. |
