As if titling the blog in Italian wasn't bad enough, I have to go and title a post in Latin. Sorry, friends. I promise I'll write it in English. Not knowing any other languages, I can be trusted to do that much.
The name means "world maps", the topic of the paper I'm writing this week. 2000 words should not be difficult to compose on the subject, considering that the subject has filled countless large, well-illustrated volumes (most of which my eyes have encountered in some way or other this week). Yet, those last 200 words (precisely!) elude me.
And somehow, getting on my blog and telling you about it has failed to add any more words to that precise, insensitive word count.
So, in the medieval mindset maps were not primarily for geographic use. Maps were created in order to teach the viewer about the world. The whole world-not just the physical aspects.
In those ages, before Locke and Hume, the physical and the spiritual had not been divorced in the minds of men. The allegory of the world meant that the physical truths led the complete soul into a greater understanding of the spiritual.
Here, John Calvin was tragically wrong--discarding the physical in favor of the spiritual. The Medievals understood that each aspect of reality unites to give us a full picture of the world-spiritual as much as physical.
They are oriented (thus the east or "orient" is at the top, instead of the north), because Christ's return is coming from the east. In the center of the earth (they reverently call it "the navel of Christ"...kind of funny), Jerusalem stands. Every single aspect of these maps teaches about the geographic, spiritual, historical, and political.
I wish medieval ages hadn't died away and we could still teach all those things at once with the beauty and simplicity of those times. What does Mapquest reveal about our age, I wonder?
The name means "world maps", the topic of the paper I'm writing this week. 2000 words should not be difficult to compose on the subject, considering that the subject has filled countless large, well-illustrated volumes (most of which my eyes have encountered in some way or other this week). Yet, those last 200 words (precisely!) elude me.
And somehow, getting on my blog and telling you about it has failed to add any more words to that precise, insensitive word count.
So, in the medieval mindset maps were not primarily for geographic use. Maps were created in order to teach the viewer about the world. The whole world-not just the physical aspects.
In those ages, before Locke and Hume, the physical and the spiritual had not been divorced in the minds of men. The allegory of the world meant that the physical truths led the complete soul into a greater understanding of the spiritual.
Here, John Calvin was tragically wrong--discarding the physical in favor of the spiritual. The Medievals understood that each aspect of reality unites to give us a full picture of the world-spiritual as much as physical.
They are oriented (thus the east or "orient" is at the top, instead of the north), because Christ's return is coming from the east. In the center of the earth (they reverently call it "the navel of Christ"...kind of funny), Jerusalem stands. Every single aspect of these maps teaches about the geographic, spiritual, historical, and political.
I wish medieval ages hadn't died away and we could still teach all those things at once with the beauty and simplicity of those times. What does Mapquest reveal about our age, I wonder?
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