Conclusion

Summary

It is conventional in the opening pages of books on medieval maps for their authors to define the central object of their study. Mappa mundi is a term that comprises the Latin words mappa (‘cloth’) and mundus (‘world’). Map historians duly scrutinise the word mappa, from which we derive the modern English word ‘map’, but seldom do mundus the same service. If the intellectual work of maps is to make the world, or an aspect of it, understandable, what ‘world’ was it that preoccupied medieval Icelanders?

This book has been about the Icelandic conception of mundus. The small corpus of Icelandic world maps give full expression to the range of conventions for visualising the known and theorised world available to medieval Europeans. The Icelandic hemispherical and zonal maps show how Icelanders theorised global space, using the cartographic image to think about the Earth's cosmic position, its sphericity, and the latitudinal distinction of its climatic zones. The paired Viðey Maps focalise the tricontinental land area known to medieval Europeans, their complex spatial arguments creating a space for Icelanders to consider their place in human history and civilization. These maps engage Icelandic understandings of mundus that resonate variously with world, Earth, and globe.

I have not been overly concerned with what a map is and is not, but rather have tried to show that an overreliance on ‘map’ as an analytical category, and the tendency to study maps only alongside other maps, has concealed the scale of their interactions with other literatures and histories. This book's analyses of the Icelandic maps in their restored manuscript contexts enable us to revise prevailing views about maps and the cultural and historical movements they intersect. They do not relate only to each another, as variant and complementary attempts to visualise the world and its places, but to other contemporary literatures about the Icelanders’ ancestry and social origins, their Commonwealth, and their place in Europe.

It has been assumed that the motivation for drawing these maps must have been to hold a mirror to the world, as Icelanders documented their own geographic awareness in map form.