While a culture may have a dominant way of mapping, its geography is always plural, and there is always competition among conceptions of space. Beginning with this understanding, this book traces the map's early development into an emblem of the state, and charts the social and cultural implications of this phenomenon. This book chronicles the specific technologies, both material and epistemological, by which the map shows itself capable of accessing, organizing, and reorienting a tremendous range of information.

While a culture may have a dominant way of 'mapping', its geography is always plural, not singular, and there is always competition among conceptions of space. Beginning with this understanding, this book traces the map's early development into an emblem of the state, and charts the social and cultural implications of this phenomenon.
Instead of presenting a sequence of medieval mapping metaphors, Daniel Birkholz offers an account of the ways in which medieval cartographic discourse itself produces its artefacts, and so produces cultural meaning. This book chronicles the specific technologies, material and epistemological, by which the map - a peculiar artefact, part image and part treatise - shows itself capable of accessing, organizing and reorienting a tremendous range of information.

This study brings new methodologies of literary geography to bear upon the unique contents of a codex known as British Library MS Harley 2253. The Harley manuscript was produced upon England's Welsh March, by a scribe whose generation died in the Black Death. It contains a diverse set of writings: love-lyrics and devotional literature, political songs and fabliaux, saints' lives, courtesy texts, bible stories and travelogues. These works alternate between languages (Middle English, Anglo-Norman and Latin) but operate in conversation with one another. The introduction explores how this fragmentary miscellany keeps being sutured into 'whole'-ness by commentary upon it. Individual chapters examine different genres and social groupings and demonstrate that there are many Harley landscapes still waiting to be discovered. It will be of great value to those studying literary history, medieval studies, cultural geography, gender studies, Jewish studies and book history. -- .