The Mappa Mundi of Fleur des Histoires
I don’t remember how I came across this image, but the site I originally found it on did not carry much in the way of information. The description read: “French medieval illuminated manuscripts. Representation of the earth as a water droplet” (Vintage Printable). I saved it to my hard drive to look up at another date. But what to search for when opening a browser tab and heading to Google? I image-searched “world as dewdrop medieval” as well as “medieval depictions of world” and got mostly cheesy stock photos. Then I tried “mappa mundi,” not thinking that this was what it was, but desiring an alternative visual representation of the medieval world. Here, on Wikipedia, was the image that I had been looking for. And it is, indeed, a form of a mappa mundi. This particular one is from Jean Mansel’s Fleur des Histoires (1467), which attempts to give a complete world history from the Creation until 1422, when King Charles VI of France died.
Looking at this image, it is hard to tell what about it can constitute a map. It clearly has very little cartographic merit, but that was not what it aimed to do. This map is a form of the T-O map, a type that separates the globe into three inhabitable zones of the known world: Asia, Europe, and Africa. These landmasses comprise the “T” in the model, with the “O” being the ocean that surrounds them. The mappa mundi is only a representation of how the world is physically ordered (orderings which abound through the Middle Ages). This phrasing, “is only,” does not really do the idea any justice. The image of the world, as we represent it, reflects how the people making such maps view it: divinely ordered, centered around the human, and, while it may not be true historically or politically, there is no privilege given to the placement of Europe on this map (which is in the lower-left section). How very different from our own maps which, in their attempt at communicating wholeness and navigability, distort the sizes of the continents. And how beautiful to see a representation of the world in which all things exist in relation to each other, not tangential spinnings out from already disordered centers. I’m not sure which view of the world is truer, and despite the imaging of order, it is certainly not true that the medieval world had no notion of this separateness. Perhaps this glossing is not what is really represented, and I wonder how the text actually deals with the histories of Asia and Africa in its broad swath of time.
Though the original description on Vintage Printable does not satisfy in the way of reference, the description of the world as being contained “in a water droplet” is an especially tender description. It captures this sense of a precious world that is both only adornment yet ultimately essential body. This cross-section of the most delicate and smallest thing with the most grand and substantial is captured in one of Julian of Norwich’s visions, in which God visits Julian and shows her “a littil thing the quantitye of an hesil nutt in the palme of [her] hand, and it was as round as a balle.” Asking what kind of thing this little hazelnut is, God answers her directly: “It is all that is made.” This image, of the world in a map, a flattened-out disc to represent a globe, all contained in water, then clouds, then fire, and finally the celestial heavens, offers a way of seeing how the world was seen. I think if we were to abandon all our needs to portray “objective” representations of our world and assign ourselves to forming a depiction of it, we would find it difficult to abandon our current norms of what objectivity means in regards to space. Are we even able to now liberate dimension and all that it contains or implicates? While the borders of the Fleurs des Histoires’ map is structured by form and order, it also represents a world without form, opened up to endless space by its very containment.
-Isabel Stern
The Junction Journal 