A Peripheral Matter?: Oceans in the East in Late-Medieval Thought, Report and Cartography - 0 views
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K Epps on 25 Aug 14"In the Navigatio sancti Brandani, the ocean voyage is imagined as a liminal phenomenon, suspended between earthly life in the terrestrial world and paradise, envisaged as an oceanic island, beyond it. Many famous medieval maps, such as the late thirteenth-century Hereford Map and its near-contemporary, the no longer extant Ebstorf world map, can be adduced to support the ocean's conceptually peripheral status in this period. Nevertheless, the genesis of the paper on which this article is based lay in a simple observation: that in a corpus of detailed world maps drawn in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries - the same period in which the Voyage of St Brendan and texts like it were circulating across Europe - the notion of the ocean sea as a peripheral phenomenon is repeatedly and graphically counteracted."