Here’s a short video from the BBC Global YouTube channel on the 1450 Fra Mauro map.
Related: Meredith F. Small’s Here Begins the Dark Sea: Venice, a Medieval Monk, and the Creation of the Most Accurate Map of the World (Pegasus, June 2023): Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.
The Ebstorf Map, a 13th-century mappa mundi, was destroyed by bombing during World War II; it survives only as black-and-white photographs and colour facsimiles of the original. Those images were used by the Leuphana Universität Lüneburg to create a digital version in 2008. And now that digital version has been used to create an interactive version of the Ebstorf Map using a video game engine. The British Library’s Medieval Manuscripts blog has the details.
The British Library has collaborated with Escape Studios’ School of Interactive and Real Time to create an interactive version of the Ebstorf map. A team of students and graduates participated in the ‘Escape Pod’ incubator to create a 3D version of the map, using the digital facsimile created by Leuphana Universität Lüneburg.
The interactive map, created in Unreal Engine, has been set in a fictional medieval scriptorium to suggest the tone of the space in which it was created. All aspects of the room were imagined, researched and created by the students at Escape.
The interactive map ties in with the British Library’s ongoing exhibition, Alexander the Great: the Making of a Myth; the map’s 15 clickable points of interest relate to Alexander. Details here.
It sounds like overkill, albeit a fun kind of overkill. It’s a free download, but requires a PC with a graphics card (i.e., no integrated graphics) running Windows 10, so I can’t try it out. But if you can, and want to, you can download it here.
Thony Christie explores the question of why north is at the top of modern maps by looking in detail at medieval and early modern maps, which had no consensus. “I think that the re-emergence of the Ptolemaic world map at the beginning of the fifteenth century and the development of modern cartography that it triggered which eventually led to the dominance of north orientation in mapmaking, perhaps combined with the increased use of the magnetic compass.”
Over at GeoLounge, Caitlin has a brief and basic overview of medieval maps and travel guides, including T-O maps, travel guides for pilgrims, mappae mundi, and portolan charts. As she points out, only the last of these even attempted to be geographically accurate; the others had other purposes.
A copy of one of the oldest maps in Britain, now exploring the newest frontier here in space #mappamundi pic.twitter.com/ghSp3PmV2f
— Tim Peake (@astro_timpeake) February 11, 2016
A copy of the Hereford Mappa Mundi, brought to the International Space Station by British astronaut Tim Peake, turned up on Twitter yesterday. BBC News has the details. [via]
