gaudio matthew paris and the cartography of the margins

7/15/2019 Gaudio Matthew Paris and the Cartography of the Margins

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Matthew Paris and the Cartography of the MarginsAuthor(s): Michael Gaudio

Source: Gesta, Vol. 39, No. 1 (2000), pp. 50-57Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the International Center of Medieval Art

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Matthew Paris and the Cartographyof the Margins

MICHAELGAUDIO

Stanford University

Abstract

During the mid-thirteenthcentury, Matthew Paris pro-duced visual itinerariesdepictingthe route rom London to the

Holy Land. Thesemaps belong to an exegetical cartographicmode also found in other medieval maps, such as mappae-mundi. Rather than serving as practical tools for directingpilgrims to theHolyLand,Matthew's tinerariesserved as oc-

casions for spiritualpilgrimages carried out within the con-

fines of St. Albans monastery. In contrast to the cartographythatemerged duringtheearlymodernperiod, in whichnatureis conceived as positive and spatially continuous, these exe-

getical maps treatnaturenegativelyas a space of discontinu-

itybetween sites of civilization.Throughvariouscartographic

strategies,nature is invokedonly to be confined o themarginsof medievalpilgrimage. Emptiedof meaning,the naturalworldthus becomes a non-space that allows humaninterpretationto enter into the cartographic text.

On a medieval mapof Britain drawnby the Benedictine

chroniclerandartist,MatthewParis(ca. 1200-1259), a brief,

apologetic sentence appearsnearthe bottomof the page. The

sentence, interruptedhalfway through by a small image of

city walls indicatingLondon,reads: "Si paginapateretur,hec

totalis insula longior esse deberet"(If the page had allowed

it, this whole island would have been longer) (Fig. 1). Com-

ing from a thirteenth-centurymonk, the statementreveals an

unexpectedattentivenessto geographicalscale.1Indeed,Mat-thew's interests in the cartographicdimensions of his island

home resultedin at least four maps of Britain,one of which

is particularly mpressive for its accuracy in shape and scale

(Fig. 2). Accordingto one scholar,these maps of Britain are

the only original maps from the early and high middle agesintended "simply to report geographical and topographicalfacts."2Inshort,MatthewParisappears o have been somethingof an innovator when he set about translatingthe physical

geographyof his world into two dimensions.

But there is at the same time a broader and less innova-

tive logic to Matthew's brief sentence, for even as it reveals

a basic knowledge of mapscale, it also makes it clear that thisartist s perfectlywilling to subordinate eographicalaccuracyto thespatialrequirementsf thepage: "Ifthepage hadallowed

it, this whole island would have been longer." The page,

however, did not allow it, and so Matthew decided to mold his

map into a cramped, rectangular form that could fit entirelywithin its borders. This may have resulted in a rather awkward-

looking Britain,but it also preservedthe integrityof the text.Had he decided simply to cut off those portionsof the island

which, accordingto the requirementsof mapscale, wouldnot

fit within the page, thenthe mapwould have revealed its con-

tingency upon a form of empirical knowledge external to the

text. Matthew'smapwould have been more like amodernmapin which the edges of the page cut off the chartedterritoryat

arbitrarypoints, the implicit assumption behind this carto-

graphic technique being that therealterrain s continuousand

is thereforea distinct, objective reality over and against its

artificialreflectionin the map. This distinction between text

and world is one which Matthew'scartographywill not allow.

If we want to understandhis maps historically,we will haveto avoid readingthem throughthe cartographicconventions

of a more scientific age. His maps arethe productsof a faith

andof a monastic tradition hatwere centereduponthe word;if they are at times innovative documents that bring a fresh

and surprisinglyaccuraterepresentationof the naturalworld

into the text, they are equally documents that extend the do-

main of the text further nto nature.Wherethe contingencyof

readingthe worldends and the hard acts of knowing he world

begin is impossible to say, for Matthew makes no distinction

between the two: his universe is a text that must always be

read, and consequently his geography finds its limits at the

borders of the page.

The authorityof the medieval mapmust thereforecomefrom within those bordersrather han from the worldbeyond.Michael Camille offers a powerful argumentas to how the

hierarchicalspatial logic of the page generates authorityin

medieval manuscripts.3Often picturedin the marginsof the

medievalpage areimages of unbridlednature-of beastsreal

and imagined and of humansengaged in base andcarnal ac-

tivities. Theposition of suchimages at or around he edges of

the page reproducesthe hierarchical status of naturein the

middle ages: nature-associated with the forest, the desert,and solitary living-was in every way held to be the antith-

esis of civilized Christiansociety.4 By marginalizingnatural

imagery,artistsemptiedit of the authoritythat for the medi-

eval viewer was always located at the privileged center. At

the sametime, however, the image in the marginsthreatens o

confound stablehierarchies,to "turn he worldupside down"

by contaminating he image or text atthe centerwith the wild,chaotic conditions of unredeemednature.ForCamille,author-

ity is possible at the center only because it is kept in this

50 GESTAXXXIX/1 @ The InternationalCenter of Medieval Art 2000

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,1 ,/mm;

?<.....i.:-,..,..•:.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . ..".

]:. ;:ii..............

FIGURE1. MatthewParis, Map of Britain,BritishLibrary,MsRoyal 14 C VII, ol. 5v (photo:by permissionof The British

Library).

51







constant,productive ension with the anti-authorityn the mar-

gins. Quite iterally, hepagebecomes a landscapewithits own

spatial politics, and upon it a hierarchyof meaning is con-

structed,with natureat the bottom and the word of God at the

top. The dialectic of center and marginoffers a particularly

appropriatemodel for interpretingMatthew'scartography,n

whichgeographical pace can never be thought apart rom the

tangible surface of the page. As we shall see, Matthew em-

ploys variousstrategiesof invokingnature n themarginsonlyto reinstate he centralityof a thoroughly extual and spiritual

geography.A brief considerationof the practicaluses to which Mat-

thew'smaps might have been put at St. Albans, the Benedic-

tine monasterywhere he lived and worked, will help clarifywhat I mean by a "thoroughlytextual and spiritual geogra-

phy."Matthew'smaps and itineraries were not intended for

instrumental use but to be looked at and read at a remove

from nature and the exigencies of thirteenth-centuryravel.

Whereas a map like the Cartepisane, a late thirteenth-cen-

tury portolan chart,5had a directly functional use-namely

navigating-Matthew's maps served a far more discursivepurpose.We can imagineMatthewshowingthese mapsto one

of St. Albans'smanyvisitors,orperhaps o a fellow monk,and

discussing the locations of towns and cities, tradingknowl-

edge of events that took place in distant lands, and even

branching nto more speculative discussion on the historical

significance of various places and how they fit into God's

plan. Matthew'smaps would have served as backgroundand

reference for such discourse, as points of departure or his-

torical and scriptural nterpretation.6 Indeed, these maps are

perhapsbetter described as "histories" han as "geographies,"and in this regardthey have much in common with a carto-

graphic form particularly popular in thirteenth-centuryEn-

gland, the mappamundi,which was in fact referred to in itstime as an historia rather han in strictly geographicalterms.7

Accordingto Hugh of St. Victor's directionsfor interpreting

mappaemundi,monasticmap-reading hould follow aprogres-sion from geographical descriptionto history and ultimatelyto the contemplationof a spiritual unity beyond history.As

MarciaKupfer explains, in Hugh'smonastery "cartographic

representationwas integrated nto a spiritualprogramof self-

distancingfrom the worldin preparationor the contemplativeascent."8 n the same fashion, Matthew observes the geogra-phy of his worldonly, in the end, to lead us awayfrom it. The

context in which Matthew's maps were made and used de-

mands that we understand them at a remove from the worldbeyond St. Albans's walls, situated firmly in the discursive,

textual, and spiritual existence of a thirteenth-century Benedic-

tine chronicler.

Although Matthew's maps offer little in the way of prac-tical information, there remains a compelling straightforward-ness to the logic of his cartography, and this is because the

borders of the page function as critical limits for his maps

every bit as literally as the walls of St. Albans stood as the crit-

AM: . vgo .......U? . . .......

PIX, 01. .......... ..............

-xV.......... . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . .

MIS..... ..lox.. .......... . . . . . . . . . ? ?

. . . . ......................x,

-41I A

v ; % r

OWAW R I L . . . . . . .

AF4mgfMV

ZA Owl...........ar n- wx Ik,INS, la?"M ally................. -,4'4?T-pm . .A";;

M 2LAwX.

......... ?V,?,,F:

..........

FIGURE2. MatthewParis, Map of Britain,BritishLibrary,MSCotton Clau-

dius D VI, ol. 12v (photo: by permission of The British Library).

ical limits of his daily existence. Matthew does not simplytake the edge of the page as a given, he makes it an operativeelement in his cartography.Thus on his map of Britain he

announcesthat the island would have been longer only "if the

page had allowed it,"and in anothergroupof maps he liter-

ally extends the edge of the page in order to accommodate

his geography.Matthewproducedseveral itineraries,each of

which is composed of a series of maps that traces the trav-

eler's route from London to the Holy Land, and in two of

these itinerariesMatthew ncludes mapswith flaps sewn onto

the edges of the page.9On a page showing the itineraryfrom

Pontremoli o Apulia, for example, the city of Rome occupiesthe addedflapalong the side of the page, while the triangularvellum additionat the top providesa home for Sicily (Fig. 3).Due to a constant need to revise and extend his work, Mat-

thew producedmost of his maps-including these-in mul-

tiple versions, andhere thatrevisionary impulse has gone so

far as to overtakethe limitingfunctionof thepage's edge. The

flaps function as a kind of marginal imagery: by boldly pro-

truding into non-textual space they risk collapsing the bor-

52







Al

t"d

oil oTIT-r, TIN xi

o l l ,

"NON---

FIGURE 3. Matthew Paris, Itineraryfrom Pontremoli to Apulia, British

Library, ms Royal 14 C VII,fol. 4 (photo: by permission of The British

Library).

ders of the page and thus subvertingthe authorityof the mapas a coherent, self-contained text; but as forms which also

bearthe textualauthorityof Matthew'swords andimages, the

flapsreinstate he authorityof the cartographicextby extend-

ing its borders. The modified map reaches out, as if with a

prosthetic limb, in order to grasp just a little bit more of a

world otherwisebeyondits reach.Or,to continue with bodily

analogies, this flap is not unlike the foot of a saint which, in

manyGothic manuscripts,extends beyond its frame andinto

the viewer's space, butonly to bringthatviewer back into the

textual center. In short, Matthew's cartographic flaps are a

surprisingly iteralandwonderfullyinventive realizationof athirteenth-centurygeographythat reaches out into naturein

order to reclaim it for history, for scripture,and for God.

Matthew's tineraries,as these odd flaps begin to suggest,are unique documents without obvious precedents. They do,to be sure, owe something to the written itineraries used by

pilgrims. Matthew, however, transforms he writtenitineraryinto a visual "strip map" showing the route from London to

Apuliaand thenmerginginto mapsof the CrusaderKingdom.

As I havealreadyargued, hese itineraries-unlike theirwritten

counterparts-did not serve the needs of the traveler. nstead,

they provide a visual historia that gives spatial organizationto the chaotic geographyof the verbal historia in the Chron-

ica Majora, Matthew'sgreatchronicle in which he recorded

all the events of his day which he consideredimportant, rom

the deeds of kings and popes to auspicious births and omi-

nous earthquakes. nboth the chronicleand the itineraries, he

Crusadesprovide a kind of organizingprinciple for earthlyexistence.10In the itineraries, the Holy Land serves as the

ultimate destination and justification of worldly travel, not

unlike its function as the symbolic center of the world in

mappaemundi.In the chronicle, the trials and tribulationsof

the Crusaders'efforts to recover the Holy Land are always

presenteitherin Matthew'snarration f events, orjust beyondthe horizon as a backgroundagainst which other temporalmattersmay be measured."Takingup the cross,"for exam-

ple, is a recurringtheme in the chronicle; and no events of

Matthew'sday receive more detailedreportsthanRichardof

Cornwall'scrusade(1240-1241) and thefirst crusadeof Louis

IX of France(1248-1254). The itinerariesand the chronicleshould thereforebe understoodas two aspects of a single his-

toricalprojectunitinga spatialworld of places and a temporalworldof events,both oriented owardanearthly,andultimately

heavenly, Jerusalem.

In this sense, the itinerariesbeara particularly lose rela-

tionshipwithmappaemundi,which similarly applya heavenlyorderto the geographyandhistoryof the fallen world.Map-

paemundi,in fact, often emphasizepilgrimage goals; one late

thirteenth-century xample fromEngland,the Herefordworld

map, even incorporates ts own itineraries.11t is also possi-ble that Matthew may have been aware of such direct con-

nections between his itinerariesandmappaemundi.We know

that he made a copy, now lost, of Henry III's world map atWestminster.12 In addition,a small, sketchyversion of a map-

pamundi by Matthew still survives, and its focus on Europeand the Holy Land suggests that he may have seen it as a

highly simplifiedconsolidationof the areas shownin his itin-

eraries and maps of the CrusaderKingdom (Fig. 4).Not so much tools for navigatingEuropeas texts avail-

able for historical exegesis, and closely related to mappae-mundiand to the historical contentsof the ChronicaMajora,the itinerariesbringthe "mapped"world to the viewer in the

formof ahistorywhosemeaning s contingentuponthe viewer's

own interpretive aculties. But where does the process of in-

terpretation nter into these images? Matthew appearsto domost of the work for us: the itineraries are organizedinto a

repetitive patternin which one town, city, or abbey is con-

nected to the next by a pair of parallel lines which Matthew

typically glosses with the word urnde, "aday's journey,"and

sometimes with notationson direction(Plate 2, Fig. 5). What

interpretivegaps remain to be filled by the viewer in these

apparentlyeamlessstrip-mapshat,one urn6eat a time,stitch

together London and the Holy Land? On the surface, this

53







organizationalstructure would seem to be entirely at odds

with the organizationof the ChronicaMajora, describedbySuzanne Lewis as a text in which

the essential componentsarejuxtaposed as equal, without

causal,subordinating, r even temporal elationships.Paris's

greatchroniclemust be decipheredas if it were apalimpsestof differenthistoriessuperimposed n both transparent nd

opaque layers of disjunctive episodes, in which the ubi-quitous conjunctionet serves simultaneouslyto link and to

separate.13

The chronicle, then, is a historywith no coherent structureat

all, a history of disconnected events to be pieced together bythe reader.Yet there is still thatgrammaticalrelation et link-

ing one historical episode to the next; and I want to suggestthat this paratacticmode of writing history-a model that cre-

ates its "narrative" t the level of the signifierbut not at the

level of the signified, providing grammaticalcoherencewith-

out providinghistorical coherence-is to be foundin the itin-

eraries as well.

Like the et of the chronicle, the parallellines linking thesites of civilization in Matthew's tineraries-and I will des-

ignatethese lines with the signum"II"-representthe spaceof

difference hatopensupbetween sites of meaning; heyare the

radically empty, purely relational signs that make significa-tion possible. Both the chronicle and the itineraries can be

understoodas two greatrun-on-sentences,as long seriesof full

signs contingentlystrung ogetherwith the emptysigns. To be

sure, those empty signs are often filled with the wordjurnde,andI will later return o the importanceof thattemporaldes-

ignationin the structuring f Matthew'scartography.Fornow,

however, I will focus on how the signum (II)creates carto-

graphicmeaning. Consider,for example, the role played by

these parallellines in linking togetherthe towns of Rochesterand Canterbury n the itinerary from London to Beauvais

(Plate 2). In thirteenth-centuryEngland,andparticularly n a

religious community like St. Albans, the castle and walled

town denotingRochester andCanterbury, espectively,would

certainlyhave been meaningful signs. Canterbury,or exam-

ple, as the seat of ArchbishopBoniface, was home to one of

the chronicle'smanyvillainswho, according o Matthew,satis-

fied his "greed of financial gain" by extorting money from

places withinhis province, including RochesterPriory.14But

thatstorydemonstratesonly one of the narrative inks which

could fill the empty lines linking Rochester and Canterbury.

Out of those threesigns-the castle, the walled town, and theparallellinesjoining them-Matthew and his contemporariescould have constructed ountlesshistories,becausethatemptylink is opento countless interpretations.Onemightobjectthat

all representation ingesuponthis interplaybetweenfull signsandempty signs, which we typically designateas the relation-

shipbetween contentandform.WhatI wantto emphasize,how-

ever, is that in the thirteenthcentury, representationdoes not

hide the fact thatits content is held together only by the con-

I'v

....................... ....t

..............

.... .:2

.....

FIGURE 4. Matthew Paris, Mappamundi, Corpus Christi College, Ms26,

p. 284 (Masterand Fellows of CorpusChristiCollege, Cambridge; hoto: The

Courtauld Institute of Art, London).

tingencies of purelyformalrelation;if the fullness of mean-

ing is to be found only in God, then humanrepresentationmust always be built upon imperfect contingencies. It is only

later,in amore secularage, thatmap-makersandhistorywrit-

ers will feel compelled to naturalize the artificial structures

holdingtheir texts together. nMatthew's tinerariesand chron-

icle, the contingencyof the et and the signum(Ii)uponhuman

interpretation emainsapparent;more thanthat, it announces

itself as the governing logic of these texts. To returnnow to

an earlierquestion-where does the process of interpretationenterinto the itineraries?-we can now proposean answer: n

the empty sign.But how one should interpretthe empty sign within a

semioticspeculiarto medievalcartographys a differentques-

tion, one requiringa brief (and necessarily oversimplifying)detourthroughthe origins of our own map-readingconven-

tions in earlymodernEurope.Duringthe sixteenth and seven-

teenth centuries,map-makersbegan to fill the empty spacesof medieval cartographywith the fullness of nature,so that

the authorityof those mapsseems to proceedfromelsewhere,

54







•i~i~~i•, i~iiiiAi

ii•I ,• •iir

!ili iiiiiii1m

yii

FIGURE 5. Matthew Paris, Itinerary from Beaumont to Beaune, British

Library, ms Royal 14 C VII,fol. 2v (photo: by permission of The British

Library).

from an object-world spatially rationalized by perspective

geometry.CartographersransformMatthew's ignum(II) nto

networksof lines bearinga standardized ndscientifically"ac-

curate"relationshipto the naturalworld. Earlymodernmapswere of course not the firstmaps to aspire to topographical

accuracy:portolancharts,for example,helpedmerchantssuc-

cessfully navigatethe Mediterraneann the samecenturywhen

Matthew createdhis itineraries.What is new, however, is the

epistemological status of the naturalworldin the early mod-

em period.Nature,now theorizedas a coherent,spatiallycon-

tinuousrealm of geographical actexisting prior o and outside

the map itself, becomes the absolute authority behind allcartographicefforts.

As we have seen with the flapsattached o his itineraries,MatthewParisplaces the viewer in a very different relation-

ship to nature:he brings nature nto the map only to make it

disappearinto the interpretive possibilities of the text. And

the same may be said for his parallel lines. If, for the medi-

eval map-maker,nature was all that was outside of civilized

society, then these lines-which appearonly betweensites of

civilization-are the only non-linguistic signs occupying the

space of nature n Matthew'smaps; they are his only visual

strategyfor imaginingthe wild, chaoticworldbeyondthe pro-tective walls of the city, castle, village, or monastery.In this

simple signum(II),Matthewfound what is in fact anextremely

logical way to representenoughof nature o lock the civilized

places in his itinerariesinto a chain of geographical,histori-

cal, andscripturalmeaning,and at the sametime neverto give

any substanceto nature,never to grant t a local habitationand

a name. Matthewfound, in otherwords, a way of namingthe

unnamable margins of medieval pilgrimage. According to

Camille, "marginalart s aboutthe anxietyof nomination and

the problem of signifying nothing in order to give birth to

meaningat the center."15s this not precisely the role of Mat-

thew's empty sign, which manages to map nature as a non-

space that makes meaning possible at centers of Europeancivilization fromLondonto the Holy Land?We have alreadyconsideredMatthew'shighly literalapproach o the page, and

now we arewitnessing an equallyliteralapproach o the sign:the unwrittenand unreadnaturalworld,the worldin between

sites of cultural significance, enters Matthew'scartographyprecisely where we should expect it to-in the empty sign.

"Empty,"however, may be a somewhat misleading ad-

jective, for as I have alreadymentioned, Matthew typicallyfills his parallellines with the wordjurnde,and that one word

introducesa critical element-the dimensionof time-into his

cartography. n order to understandhow this word signifieswithin the context of the itineraries,we should remember hat

Matthew's ignum(II)reducesthe mapto its formalessentials,

"grounding"his cartographyin formal contingencies that

become meaningful only throughthe viewer's own interpre-tive work. At this critical point, where the cartographic ext

is strippeddown to its skeletal structure, he itinerariesreveal

a basic truthof all semiotic systems: that the meaningof the

sign is both absolutely arbitraryand entirely determinedby

history.Withina cartographicontext,Matthew's ignsbearout

Saussure'sunderstanding f languageas a collection of empty

signifierswhich have no naturalconnectionto the world,but

instead have meaningsdeterminedby a communityof speak-ers acting within time.16 And this is wherejurnde comes in:

precisely at the point of maximumcontingency in the itiner-

ary,where the mapcalls attentionto itself as an arbitraryor-

mal structure,Matthew inserts the wordjurnde, and thus in

the most concise fashion he introducesthe element that inex-

tricably inks semiotic systems to humancommunities-time.

Jurndeis a history told in a single word;as the brief "story"of a day'sjourney,jurnde is the shortest tale told by the his-

torian of the ChronicaMajora.But it is also a wordthat does

no more than suggest historical meaning; it offers the di-

mension of time but stops short of resolving it into anythingconcrete.Jurnde nserts theviewer intohistoryand at the same

time leaves the meaning of that history-and perhaps "pil-

grimage"or "crusade"would be more precise words in this

case-radically undetermined.

55







t i r e0:

1 \ 1 1 f i l m , f a l l t o C C I I l

I o t i

FIGURE6. MatthewParis, Mapof the CrusaderKingdom,righthalf BritishLibrary,MsRoyal 14 C VII, ol. 5 (photo: by permissionofThe BritishLibrary).

56







Once again,thepromiseof knowledgedissolves into end-

less textuality.Grounded n the contingencies of readingand

viewing, Matthew'scartographynever leads us to a worldbe-

yond the text. Indeed, as we follow the itineraries from Lon-

don to the Holy Land, they literally reverse modern habits of

map-reading: nstead of moving fromthe mapto anobjective

world,we move fromthe mapto a deeper textuality.The visual

logicof the itineraries

steadilybreaks

down,as the connect-

ing lines between towns disappearin Italy and finally, in the

Holy Land, the strip-mapformat completely disappearsand

text virtuallytakes over the page (Fig. 6). The final pages of

the itineraries,the culminationof thejourneyto the Crusader

Kingdom, are the most discursive pages, a chaoticjumble of

scripturaland historicalreferences.These pages represent he

ultimatedestination of a spiritualcrusadethat defers physical

conquest and materialreward in favor of a Holy Land that

exists only as a set of interpretivepossibilities.

Througha close consideration of the itinerariesof Mat-

thew Paris,I have tried to articulatesome of the semiotic fea-

tures of a medieval cartographythat shares little epistemic

groundwith the scientific cartographywhich grew out of thepractical,andparticularlymercantile,needs of travelers dur-

ing the late middle ages. Matthew's itinerariesbelong to the

exegetical mode of mappingin which recent scholarshiphas

placed other medieval maps such as mappaemundiand cer-

tain regional maps of the Holy Land.17Such maps requireus

to distanceourselves frommodernmappingpracticeswith their

"transparent"chematizations of objective space, so that we

can recognize this cartography or what it is-not a primitiveversion of our own buta positive form of organizingspace in

a world in which signs are not tied to their referents and

meanings are never final.18

NOTES

S See R. Vaughan,MatthewParis (Cambridge,1958), 243; S. Lewis, The

Artof MatthewParis in the ChronicaMajora(Berkeley,1987), 365; and

D. Woodward, TheHistory of Cartography,I, Cartography n Prehis-

toric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean Chicago,

1987), 288.

2. J. Schulz, "Jacopo de Barbari'sView of Venice: Map Making, CityViews, and MoralizedGeographyBefore theYear1500,"AB,LX (1978),442-443.

3. M. Camille, Image on the Edge: TheMargins of Medieval Art (Cam-

bridge, 1992), 55.

4. Accordingto Jacques Le Goff, "in the Middle Ages, the great contract

was . . . between nature and culture,expressed in terms of the opposi-tion between what was built, cultivated and inhabited(city, castle, vil-

lage) and what was essentially wild .. " J. Le Goff, The Medieval

Imagination, trans. A. Goldhammer(Chicago, 1985), 58.

5. Portolan charts were just beginning to be used in the mid-thirteenth

century.See P. D. A. Harvey,Medieval Maps (London, 1991), 39-49.

Refer to plate 30 in that book for an illustrationof the Cartepisane.

6. Matthew'smaps, andparticularlyhis maps of the Holy Land, are sim-

ilar in this sense to regional maps of the Holy Landoriginatingin late

antiquity, uchas aneleventh-century opy of Jerome'smapof Palestine,

which Catherine Delano Smith describes as a map that "would seemto have been created in the interests of textualexegesis."C. D. Smith,

"GeographyorChristianity?Maps of the Holy Land Before AD 1000,"

Journal of Theological Studies, XLII (1991), 148.

7. M. Kupfer, "Medieval world maps: embedded images, interpretive

frames,"W&I,X (1994), 277.

8. Ibid., 270.

9. All references to Matthew's tineraries will be to the two versions dis-

cussed in Lewis, The Art of Matthew Paris: British Library,Royal 14.

C. VIIandCorpusChristiCollege 26. For the sake of convenience,I do

not make any attemptto distinguishbetween these two manuscripts.

10. Accordingto Lewis, "the whole itinerary may have been conceived in

connection with Richard of Cornwall'scrusade."Lewis, The Art ofMatthewParis, 325.

11. Woodward, The History of Cartography, 288. Also see S. Phillips,"The outer world of the EuropeanMiddle Ages," in Implicit Under-

standings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters

Between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, ed.

S. B. Schwartz (Cambridge, 1994), 30. Refer to plate 22 of Harvey,Medieval Maps, for an illustrationof the Hereford world map.

12. Lewis, The Art of MatthewParis, 372.

13. Ibid., 51.

14. Chroniclesof Matthew Paris: MonasticLife in the ThirteenthCentury,ed. and trans. R. Vaughan(Gloucester, 1984), 218-219.

15. Camille, Image on the Edge, 48.

16. E de Saussure,Coursein GeneralLinguistics,ed. C. Bally andA. Seche-

haye, trans. W. Baskin (New York, 1966), 77-78.17. On the regional maps of the Holy Land, see Smith, "Geography or

Christianity?"

18. Daniel K. Connolly'sarticle,"ImaginedPilgrimage n theItineraryMapsof MatthewParis"(AB,LXXXI [1999], 598-622) appearedwhile this

article was in press, and so I have not had the opportunityto take it

into account in the body of my text. I would like to note here,however,that I find Connolly's interpretationof Matthew's itineraries and myown to be, on the whole, complementary.His readingof the itineraries

as an "imagined pilgrimage" supportsa basic premise of my own ar-

gument. Ourapproaches o the materialdiffer in thatConnolly focuses

on a performative relation between the viewer's body and the map,whereas my concern is primarilywith spatial and semiotic relations

upon the pages of the maps themselves. If Connolly makes a case for

theimportance

of the embodied act ofinterpretation,

I wouldpoint

out

that the act must find an occasion. That occasion is to be found in a

space that opens up between center and margin, between full signs and

empty signs, on the pages of Matthew's itineraries.

57

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