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The Bestiary on the Hereford World Map (c. 1300)

  • Debra Higgs Strickland
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Maps and Travel in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period
This chapter is in the book Maps and Travel in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period

Abstract

This essay seeks to clarify relationships between the English medieval bestiary tradition and the Hereford World Map (c. 1300) through close examination of how the map’s animal imagery functioned in its broader cartographical context, in which artistic strategies of proximity, spatial alignment, and geographical location are crucial to the creation of meaning. Created in Hereford around 1300, at a time when bestiaries in England had reached their apogee, this celebrated mappa mundi, with its twenty-eight or so bestiary creatures, provides an opportunity to consider how the bestiary contributed to the geographical, theological, political, and temporal dimensions of its large and complex image-field. Given the map’s nearly continuous presence in Hereford Cathedral, I move beyond the universal Christian moralizations attached to its bestiary birds and beasts to consider how the same creatures might have also served more local English concerns by evoking the legacy of King Edward I, during whose reign the map was made. I pay special attention to places on the map in which particular bestiary creatures and their geographical locations work together with surrounding imagery to reference Edward’s expulsion of the Jews in 1290, his crusading ambitions, and his position within the Plantagenet dynasty. Using the relationship between the medieval English bestiary and the Hereford World Map as a case example, the broader question I seek to address is: How does the ‘importation’ of external traditions into a cartographical context alter or expand traditional meanings?

Abstract

This essay seeks to clarify relationships between the English medieval bestiary tradition and the Hereford World Map (c. 1300) through close examination of how the map’s animal imagery functioned in its broader cartographical context, in which artistic strategies of proximity, spatial alignment, and geographical location are crucial to the creation of meaning. Created in Hereford around 1300, at a time when bestiaries in England had reached their apogee, this celebrated mappa mundi, with its twenty-eight or so bestiary creatures, provides an opportunity to consider how the bestiary contributed to the geographical, theological, political, and temporal dimensions of its large and complex image-field. Given the map’s nearly continuous presence in Hereford Cathedral, I move beyond the universal Christian moralizations attached to its bestiary birds and beasts to consider how the same creatures might have also served more local English concerns by evoking the legacy of King Edward I, during whose reign the map was made. I pay special attention to places on the map in which particular bestiary creatures and their geographical locations work together with surrounding imagery to reference Edward’s expulsion of the Jews in 1290, his crusading ambitions, and his position within the Plantagenet dynasty. Using the relationship between the medieval English bestiary and the Hereford World Map as a case example, the broader question I seek to address is: How does the ‘importation’ of external traditions into a cartographical context alter or expand traditional meanings?

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter I
  2. Contents V
  3. Notes on Contributors VII
  4. Maps and Travel: An Introduction 1
  5. Part I: Historical Space
  6. Traveling the Mappa Mundi: Readerly Transport from Cassiodorus to Petrarch 17
  7. The Bestiary on the Hereford World Map (c. 1300) 37
  8. Cultural Landscape in Christian and Jewish Maps of the Holy Land 74
  9. Part II: Use and Reception
  10. Winds and Continents: Concepts for Structuring the World and Its Parts 91
  11. Fictive Travel and Mapmaking in Fourteenth-Century Iberia 136
  12. Les cartes marines comme source de réflexion géographique au XVe siècle 165
  13. Around the World: Borders and Frames in Two Sixteenth-Century Norman Map Books 189
  14. Part III: Travel into Sacred Spaces
  15. The Travels of the Rabbis and the Rabbinic Horizons of the Inhabited World 221
  16. Real and Fictive Travels to the Holy Land as Painted in the Florence Scroll 232
  17. Between Nazareth and Loreto: The Role of the Stone Bricks in Caravaggio’s ‘Madonna di Loreto’ 252
  18. Sacred Topographies and the Optics of Truth: Vasilij Grigorovich Barskij’s Journeys to Mount Athos (1725–1744) 281
  19. Part IV: Word and Images
  20. Antwerp Civic Self-Portraits 315
  21. Fra Niccolò Guidalotto’s City View, Nautical Atlas and Book of Memories: Cartography and Propaganda between Venice and Constantinople 342
  22. How to Represent the New World When One Is Not Andrea Mantegna: Sovereigns in the Americas on Sixteenth-Century Maps 363
  23. Index of Toponyms and Locations 383
  24. Index of Historical, Religious and Mythological Figures 395
  25. Index of Modern Authors 403
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110588774-003

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter I
  2. Contents V
  3. Notes on Contributors VII
  4. Maps and Travel: An Introduction 1
  5. Part I: Historical Space
  6. Traveling the Mappa Mundi: Readerly Transport from Cassiodorus to Petrarch 17
  7. The Bestiary on the Hereford World Map (c. 1300) 37
  8. Cultural Landscape in Christian and Jewish Maps of the Holy Land 74
  9. Part II: Use and Reception
  10. Winds and Continents: Concepts for Structuring the World and Its Parts 91
  11. Fictive Travel and Mapmaking in Fourteenth-Century Iberia 136
  12. Les cartes marines comme source de réflexion géographique au XVe siècle 165
  13. Around the World: Borders and Frames in Two Sixteenth-Century Norman Map Books 189
  14. Part III: Travel into Sacred Spaces
  15. The Travels of the Rabbis and the Rabbinic Horizons of the Inhabited World 221
  16. Real and Fictive Travels to the Holy Land as Painted in the Florence Scroll 232
  17. Between Nazareth and Loreto: The Role of the Stone Bricks in Caravaggio’s ‘Madonna di Loreto’ 252
  18. Sacred Topographies and the Optics of Truth: Vasilij Grigorovich Barskij’s Journeys to Mount Athos (1725–1744) 281
  19. Part IV: Word and Images
  20. Antwerp Civic Self-Portraits 315
  21. Fra Niccolò Guidalotto’s City View, Nautical Atlas and Book of Memories: Cartography and Propaganda between Venice and Constantinople 342
  22. How to Represent the New World When One Is Not Andrea Mantegna: Sovereigns in the Americas on Sixteenth-Century Maps 363
  23. Index of Toponyms and Locations 383
  24. Index of Historical, Religious and Mythological Figures 395
  25. Index of Modern Authors 403
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