Transforming Europe in the Images of the World, 1110-1500
Fuzzy Geographies
9789048563166
236 pages
Amsterdam University Press
Overview
This is the first book to examine the wide and important geographical tradition that arose from the description of the world in the Imago mundi – a medieval encyclopedic bestseller, almost unrivalled in popularity from its composition in the 1110s well into the age of print. The Imago mundi was translated into most European vernaculars and extracts from it were adapted into vernacular works ranging from encyclopedias to literary fiction, verse and prose. This is the first study to examine this tradition as a unified whole. It focuses in particular on the permutations undergone by the depiction of the region designated as ‘Europe’ in the original text and its later adaptations. The book demonstrates the incredible flexibility of the original text and how this enabled the transformation of this spatial description to suit the linguistic, political and cultural needs of vernacular adaptations.
Author Bio
: Natalia I. Petrovskaia holds MA, MPhil and PhD degrees from the University of Cambridge. She is currently Assistant Professor in Celtic at Utrecht University. This book is the result of her recent NWO Veni Project, ‘Defining Europe in Medieval European Geographical Discourse’.
