This is the first book to examine the wide and important geographical tradition that arose from the description of the world in the Imago mundi – a medieval encyclopedic bestseller, almost unrivalled in popularity from its composition in the 1110s well into the age of print. The Imago mundi was translated into most European vernaculars and extracts from it were adapted into vernacular works ranging from encyclopedias to literary fiction, verse and prose. This is the first study to examine this tradition as a unified whole. It focuses in particular on the permutations undergone by the depiction of the region designated as ‘Europe’ in the original text and its later adaptations. The book demonstrates the incredible flexibility of the original text and how this enabled the transformation of this spatial description to suit the linguistic, political and cultural needs of vernacular adaptations.

Natalia I. Petrovskaia holds MA, MPhil and PhD degrees from the University of Cambridge. She is currently Assistant Professor in Celtic at Utrecht University. This book is the result of her recent NWO Veni Project, ‘Defining Europe in Medieval European Geographical Discourse’.

Table of Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Starting Out. ‘Europes’, Hippogriffs, and Mathematics
Part I: An Introduction to the Imago Mundi tradition
Chapter 1. Understanding the World. An Overview of the Imago mundi
Chapter 2. Translating Knowledge. An Introduction to the Imago Mundi Family
Part II. Modes of Reading Geography
Chapter 3. Time. Authority and Archaism
Chapter 4. Space. Geographical Regions as Fuzzy Sets
Chapter 5. Movement. The Hodoeporical Descriptive Technique
Conclusion: Looking Back and Looking Ahead
Appendices
Bibliography
Manuscripts
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
Electronic Resources