World View

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Hereford_Mappa_Mundi_1300.jpg

Before C caught her train to London yesterday we visited the Mappa Mundi. A last minute decision to fit this in, and I'm so glad we did. It was a first for us both.

According to the official guidebook:

It is the largest and best surviving example of a type of cartography which flourished particularly in England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. These were works of history, zoology, anthropology and theology, as well as geography, and reflected the contemporary passion for arranging knowledge in comprehensive form .....It summarises the world view and many of the major topics of intellectual interest of the period and may best be regarded as a type of pictorial encyclopaedia, or a map of the medieval mind.

Standing before the Mappa Mundi in the silent room with its subdued lighting leading off the cathedral, it's easy to visualise its two creators (according to the guide this was the likely number), their rounded backs hunched over the vellum, one making the line drawings, one inscribing names. Talking quietly to each other, perhaps, as they worked. You wonder what they believed about the places and stories they were depicting.

The map mixes what we would now call fact and myth indiscriminately, with drawings of actual countries and continents, centaurs, sphinxes, a hermaphrodite, Noah's Ark, a bear, fortresses, cities, rivers and a rhinocerous. And much else besides. All this bound together within a religious rather than geographical framework: Jerusalem is at the centre of the map and Christ sits in judgment over it all at the top, looking down on his creation.

It's a heady, hallucinatory combination and unexpectedly moving. I was struck by the resemblance to a mandala.

***

In the afternoon another friend and I drove to the remains of an Iron Age hill fort a few miles out of town. The bare branches of the beech trees at the summit creaked and sighed in chorus as scudding clouds were swept across the sky by a strong westerly wind. The conservative estimate is that these earthworks have been here for at least two thousand years.

We walked around the perimeter of the fort and then, as the original inhabitants probably did, climbed onto the north-facing earth parapet. There we contemplated far below us the small city with its cathedral, its river and its creeping suburban sprawl. In the distance to our left, Wales and the lead-grey bulk of the Black Mountains, to our right but hidden by trees, the Malverns.

It was almost dark and lights were glowing in nearby houses when we returned home. The kettle was boiled and the remaining mince pies served. I didn't switch on the TV till much later. The contents of the nightly news bulletin yesterday were a vivid reminder that these days the local and the global are sometimes hard to separate ....



More on the Mappa Mundi here and here, and a news report this week on the granting by UNESCO of an entry for the map on its Memory of the World International Register.