"To passe the see in shortt space": mapping the world in the Digby Mary Magdalen

Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Annual, 2006 by D.K. Smith

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

This being so, if we are to imagine the geographical context of English culture during the late fifteenth century, we may take as an iconic example the Hereford Mappa Mundi. Drawn in approximately 1285, it stands as a useful paradigm of the state of geographical knowledge, certainly at the level of popular consciousness. To understand this map is to go a long way toward understanding how the world looked to the mass of English people comprising the likely audience of the Digby play.

The World as It Looked

The Hereford map is set in a circle fifty-two inches in diameter, surrounded by the points of the compass and figurative representations of the twelve winds. Within the limits of what was the old Roman Empire, for which classical sources existed, a number of cities are shown, conventionally pictured and named. But in the vast remainder of the world most of the space is filled, not with place names or locations, but with innumerable little illustrations and snippets of information, most of it more mythological and religious than geographic. And around this complex collection of stories and scenes, four golden letters--MORS--spell out the Latin word for death, evoking the central spiritual message of the map: "that Jerusalem and the cross are the focal point of a world dominated by death and the Day of Judgement" (Moir 24).

With so much of the focus on spiritual representation, it isn't surprising that geographical precision was less than crucial. Even at its creation the Hereford Map made no claims for current cartographic knowledge. There was no effort to draw the map to a common scale, and little attempt to give a detailed view of the coastline. Islands are often represented conventionally, without regard to their actual appearance, but rather in the shape of objects they were somehow thought to resemble, so that the island of Sardinia takes on the unexpected shape of a footprint. (2) The western limit of the known world is marked by the even-then mythical Pillars of Hercules, and surrounding the whole is the great outer ocean studded with islands, many of them apocryphal. Such extensive and deliberate mythification cannot be the result of oversight or accident. These choices reflect instead a particular set of priorities.

For, in many ways the Hereford mappa mundi is less a map, in modern terms, than a narrative document, not so very different in intent from the graphic novels of today. In the lower left corner in French is written "Let all who have this estoire, or shall hear or see or read it, pray to Jesus in God for pity on Richard of Haldingham and Lafford who has made and drawn it, that joy in heaven be granted to him." The map is thus configured from the beginning as an "estoire," a story or history, with an implicitly narrative intent and a purpose far beyond geographical description.

In fact, its geographical usefulness would have been decidedly slight. It would have been too large to carry as a portable guide and no more helpful than a globe in planning the day-to-day details of an actual journey. Where it might have succeeded, however, is as a picture book in which men could see the wonders of the world without leaving home. In a time when few people could read, it would have been the function of these maps--along with pictures, murals, sculptures, and paintings--to provide instruction in biblical history. Housed as it was in the Hereford Cathedral, the mappa mundi may well have served as an aid to preaching. In this way, the understanding of the world encapsulated in the Hereford Map would have been passed on to a mass audience, which absorbed not only a world of Christian history but a sense of their own relationship to that world, a relationship defined not in geographical terms but in the spiritual terms that the church imposed.