Martin Foys

An unfinished mappa mundi from late-eleventh-century Worcester

Abstract This article discusses the unfinished mappa mundi found in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 265, dates it to a late-eleventh-century (c. 1065–95) production in Worcester, identifying it as a nearly exact and earlier analogue of two later twelfth-century English maps of the world from the Ramsey area (Oxford, St Johns College 17 and London, British Library, Harley 3667). Contained as it is in a collection of Wulfstanian materials, the Worcester maps relationship to these so-called ‘Bryhtferthian’ maps requires a rethinking of how such maps may have circulated and functioned outside of a computisitical context. The close connections between these three maps further point to a unique, late Anglo-Saxon tradition of mappae mundi thus far unrecognized.