Imagined Pilgrimage in the Itinerary Maps of Matthew Paris

Imagined Pilgrimage in the Itinerary Maps of Matthew ParisAuthor(s): Daniel K. ConnollySource: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 81, No. 4 (Dec., 1999), pp. 598-622Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3051336 .

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Imagined Pilgrimage in the Itinerary Maps of Matthew Paris Daniel K. Connolly

The first seven pages of Matthew Paris's famous Chronica

majora make up a kind of medieval road map, linking London

through the major cities and towns of Europe with the great European centers of pilgrimage, Rome, and Jerusalem (Figs. 1-7).1 These pages, written and illustrated about 1250 by Matthew Paris at the Benedictine abbey of St. Albans, En-

gland, strike the modern viewer as somehow familiar in their

dynamic and participatory design. Turning the itinerary pages leads the viewer toward Jerusalem, and folding or

unfolding the flaps that Matthew appended to the pages depicting Italy transforms the route and adds to the meanings of those spaces (Figs. 5, 14). This interactive quality has been

completely overlooked by modern scholarship. Nonetheless, the skills, practices, and associations required of these pages, while not otherwise deployed in the more familiar, schematic

representations of the medieval world, were readily available to the St. Albans monk through other characteristically medieval manipulations of time and space.2 The Benedictine brother who perused these pages understood this map primarily through its performative possibilities, as a dynamic setting, the operation of whose pages, texts, images, and

appendages aided him in effecting an imagined pilgrimage that led through Europe to the Crusader city of Acre and

eventually to a complex representation of Jerusalem. This

image ofJerusalem was seen as both the unavailable center of

earthly pilgrimage and as a goal of spiritual contemplations, which focused on it as a figure of the HeavenlyJerusalem.

Jerusalem, the actual, historic city, was so central a place in Christian history and theology that the desire to visit its holy sites, especially those of Christ's death and resurrection contained in the Holy Sepulchre complex, pervaded medieval culture.3 Yet relatively few people during the Middle Ages could make a physical pilgrimage to Jerusalem; expense, hardship, tenure to the land, and monastic vows meant that most people had to look to a substitute form for such a

spiritually significant journey.4 In monastic settings, contem-

plations on the earthly city of Jerusalem, which quickly evolved into focused meditations on the HeavenlyJerusalem, called for a projection into imagined spaces and so could serve as a substitute form of pilgrimage. In the early twelfth

century, an anonymous Benedictine of the abbey of B&ze expressed the desire to visit the city and imagined its fulfillment in the only terms available to a cloistered brethren, as a

meditational exercise and, ultimately, as an imagined journey:5

The frequent recollection of the city ofJerusalem and of its King is to us a sweet consolation, a pleasing occasion for meditation and necessary lightening of our heavy burden. ... May my words be as a drop of oil on the fire which God

has enkindled in your hearts, so that your souls, burning with both the fire of charity and the oil of this exhortation, may rise up stronger, burn with greater fervor, and mount

ever higher. May your soul leave this world, traverse the heavens themselves, and pass beyond the stars until you reach God. Seeing Him in spirit and loving Him, may you breathe a gentle sigh and come to rest in Him. ... there is full beatitude because there is full vision of God. Vision, I

say, is in knowledge, knowledge is found in love, love is with

praise, and praise finds security and all this is without end. Who will give us wings like the dove, and we shall fly

across all the kingdoms of this world, and we shall

penetrate the depths of the eastern sky? Who then will conduct us to the city of the great king in order that what we now read in these pages and see only as in a glass darkly, we may then look upon the face of God present before us, and so rejoice?6

Dom Jean LeClercq first laid the groundwork for the study of imagined pilgrimage by monastics when he used the

phrase peregrinatio in stabilitate to describe the interior, medita- tive practices that allowed monks to make a pilgrimage with their hearts and not their feet.7 At its center lie practices of focused meditations whose goal was the shedding of the self in a spiritual pilgrimage to the Heavenly Jerusalem. Peregrina- tio in stabilitate is not a documented, institutionalized practice (it is not a phrase used by medieval authors), but it is a way of

comprehending the explosion of metaphoric language meant to characterize the monastic life as one directed toward a goal defined by, and in some sense against, the monk's cloistered existence. This antagonism is registered most vividly in the common meanings monks invested in the term cloister or claustrum. Claustrum carried various connotations of a prison, of a secure, confined, and confining space. The Rule of Saint Benedict, for example, specifically linked the claustra (confines) of the monastery with the vow of stability each monk made.8 At the same time, the cloister represented also the ideal realization of an interior spiritual journey, and it was this interior journey that was prized over and above any actual

journey. It is in the cloister, argued Saint Bernard of Clairvaux

(1090-1153), that the monk comes to find the Heavenly Jerusalem, the real goal of any and all pilgrimages, for the

actual, historic city was itself only an image, a figure of the future Heavenly City: "For the object of monks is to seek out not the earthly but the Heavenly Jerusalem, and this is not by proceeding with [their] feet but by progressing with [their]

feelings."9 The itinerary maps by the thirteenth-century artist and

chronicler Matthew Paris responded to just these desires of their monastic viewers to access the Heavenly Jerusalem.'0 Cloistered monks, though discouraged from going on pilgrimage to the earthly city, could nonetheless use Matthew's maps for an imaginative journey to the Heavenly Jerusalem." "Who will give us wings like the dove, and we shall fly across all the kingdoms of this world, and we shall penetrate the



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depths of the eastern sky?" The answer to this not altogether rhetorical question lies in the self-referential emphasis on the

materiality of the texts before the monk-"what we now read in these pages." Attaining vision of God, moving the soul from this world to the Heavens begin with the texts (and images) inscribed in the physical and material world of the

manuscript page. On the lower left-hand side of the first page of the Chronica

majora (Fig. 1), two roads depart London and climb the page, traversing southeast England to reach the English Channel.

Descriptions of the routes' directions and the number of days' travel, written in Old French (for example, jurnee [day] or

jurnee e demie [day and a half]), construct the roads that connect the cities.12 The left-hand route moves through two small abbeys and veers off the page toward the sea: "vers la Marine." The other, central route runs through Rochester

("Le Chemin a Rouescestre") and Canterbury (Canterbire) to reach Dover (Dovera) and its shores at the top of the page. The routes then continue at the lower right of the page with Calais

(Caleis) and Wissant (Watsant') and move through the towns of northwest France. This format of a central route and another side route endures for the next three pages, that is, until folios 2 verso and 3 recto (Figs. 4, 5), where the relatively straightfor- ward design gives way to profusion and complexity as texts fill the space of southern Italy and the viewer encounters extra

pieces of vellum that have been appended to the top and side of the recto folio. Both texts and flaps extend the normal boundaries of the codex and, in addition, present the viewer with the possibility of changing the itinerary. By turning the

flaps over the recto or verso of their page or extending them

out, the viewer is able to reconfigure the spaces of Christian

Europe, alter the routes, and refashion the meanings to be



600 ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 1999 VOLUME LXXXI NUMBER 4

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derived from them. The last two pages of the itinerary, folios 3 verso and 4 recto (Figs. 6, 7), are filled with texts in Old French of legends and descriptions of the Holy Land. In the midst of these highly ambiguous and ambivalent spaces, at the end of the road, and yet presented as a distinctly separate visual experience from the rest of the map, lies the ideal,

geometric, and quite colorful depiction of Jerusalem as an unusual combination of both the historic earthly Jerusalem and the future Heavenly City on earth. Its own confines house the three sites of greatest interest to earthly pilgrims: the

Temple of the Lord, the Temple of Solomon, and the Holy Sepulchre. At the same time, the fact that Jerusalem is

represented with square walls specifically invokeJohn's apocalyptic vision of HeavenlyJerusalem, and so participate then in the traditional iconography of this final city.13 Moreover, Matthew's radical shift to the more profound language of

Latin for the city's inscriptions, the only Latin of the map, puts the city at a remove from the rest of the map; this text describes the city as "the most dignified of all cities, because there in his death the Lord added to it; because it is in the middle of the World; because it was the first dwelling-place."'4 At the bottom of this page, and therefore next to the body of the viewer of this book, a rather enigmatic figure captures our attention. A lone figure of a monk wearing a cowl signals our arrival in the Holy Land; he looks out at the viewer as he steers his boat, contemplating the meaning of his destination as well as the means of his voyage there.

Suzanne Lewis's study of the art of the Chronica majora remains the most thorough investigation of Matthew's maps to date, arguing successfully for a fuller and more nuanced

appreciation of their place in the tradition of medieval chronicle writing.'5 The topographic layout of the last two



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pages had led scholars to view these pages depicting the Holy Land as a map distinctly separate from the itinerary, even to the point that they edited the appended flaps out of their illustrations. Lewis, however, argues for a unity and continuity across these disparate pages, seeing the last pages as a culmination of the previous movements. Lewis is also the first to reproduce the two more complete versions of the itinerary (along with all their attachments), Matthew's world map, and two of his four maps of England.16 Finally, Lewis's study provides the first detailed description of the itinerary's routes,

identifying the towns along the way toJerusalem. And yet the emphatically linear format of Matthew's maps

presents a problem, especially for a history of forms, because it so clearly distinguishes the itineraries as unique examples in medieval cartography.'7 This lack of a formal genealogy

prompted Lewis to investigate the possible origins of their formal design in a different kind of format altogether-not as

part of a codex but as a folding, horizontal "strip map."'8

Although Lewis intuitively retains a performative value in her

theory, these origins as a folding strip map must, at the same

time, deny the role of Matthew's appended flaps and ignore the significance of previous versions of the design.

Lewis proposes that Matthew made the version in the British Library (ms Royal 14 C vii) before CCCC ms 26 and that the folios of the Bristish Library copy are actually now

composed of two folios pasted back to back. Before being pasted together, these folios would have been joined initially at their side edges to form a long, horizontal, folding map. The folios therefore would have to be blank on their versos. This map would have been read left to right, up and down the




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columns in an unbroken sequence, and would have had the added advantage of revealing only one section at a time to the reader. At some later point, Matthew presumably broke up this long strip map, pasted the separate sheets together, and added the flaps.'9 According to Lewis, Matthew then copied the map in British Library ms Royal 14 C vii, once it had been recast into a format suitable to a codex, to form the itinerary in CCCC ms 26.

While ingenious, such a theory is not supported by the

physical evidence. The map in British Library ms Royal 14 C vii is currently preserved between acrylic sheets, separate from its volume of the Historia Anglorum and the Chronica majora. These pages, while unavailable for close physical analysis, do not appear to have the thickness of two pieces of vellum pasted back to back. When I examined these folios, I saw no evidence that the folios were pasted together, and many a rough, worn

edge showed the presence of only one folio. In addition, Matthew's previous versions of the itinerary suggest he devel-

oped its design within a codex format (that is, as pages to be

turned), as opposed to an independent travel map.20 For the content of the itinerary and its textual sources,

Lewis chose to emphasize the more secular possibilities of its context in the Chronica, understanding the itinerary as "illustrations" of the great chronicle. The itinerary (CCCC ms 26) does indeed continue to the Holy Land, though she does not have it end atJerusalem but at Acre, which is signified as the terminus by its disproportionate size, "accurately reflecting their respective approximate populations of 30,000 versus

5,000."21 Making the itinerary end at Acre allows her to see the last pages "not as a pilgrim's journey to the Holy Land, but rather as a visualization of all the important political and

military sites mentioned in his chronicles of the Crusades.''22



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IMAGINED PILGRIMAGE IN THE ITINERARY MAPS OF MATTHEW PARIS 605

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The Crusades provide a convenient and quite probable source for Matthew's knowledge of many of the towns and therefore much of the route that leads through Italy to the

Holy Land. Following both Richard Vaughan and Hans- Eberhard Hilpert, Lewis hypothesized Richard of Cornwall's crusade as an explanatory model for the maps.23 Yet Lewis's characterization of the itinerary as an illustration of the chronicle goes too far, despite the apparent "matches" between towns on the map and their mention in the Chronica.24 In fact, both the travels of Richard of Cornwall and the Chronica majora include far more places than show up in the

itinerary, and by 1250, the routes of the Crusades and of

pilgrimage to the Holy Land were well established.25 Search-

ing thus for the particular sources for the content of Paris's routes seems unproductive.26

Nonetheless, this multiplicity of sources provides the oppor- tunity to consider the different possible meanings to be associated with these materials. Matthew Paris wrote and illustrated many of his materials for lay and religious audi- ences.27 We know, for example, that King Henry III was aware of the Chronica and even asked that Matthew record special events in it.28 The Chronica majora, and the maps that preface it, may well have been available to the king or other nobles, who would have viewed them according to their own predispositions toward ajourney toJerusalem.29 Those predispositions might be shaped by the Crusades, by a spiritual pilgrimage, or

perhaps some combination of both.30 Still, the primary audience for which this history and its illustrations were

composed remains Matthew's monastic community at St. Albans. The tradition of chronicle writing in a monastery was



606 ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 1999 VOLUME I.XXXI

NUMBER 4

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8 Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, The Heptarchy of Britain, fol. 4v

one devoted to the recording of sacred history-a recording that set the events of man and of the world in an intelligible order by which the religious could see and perhaps discern the movements of the Divine Plan.31 Matthew Paris, as we shall

see, was well acquainted with the Victorine theories of history that invested the place of a historical event with a prophetic significance. In his De arca Noe morali, Hugh of St. Victor (d. 1142) wrote about discerning the Divine Plan: "Order in the works of restoration is to be considered in three ways: place, time, and dignity.... The order of place, however, and the order of time seem to run parallel in almost everything, following the sequence of events."32 Geography then did not stand alone, but was combined with history and theology to become a sacred geography. The reading of the maps that I

propose in this paper is one where the primary audience encounters the maps within this tradition of viewing history and geography as an unfolding of the Divine Plan, becoming the stuff of exegesis and performed at the level of personal meditation.

The map's position at the front of its chronicle and in the

company of genealogies, tables, and a calendar specific to the

abbey indicates that Matthew made these maps specifically for St. Albans.33 This front matter includes, on the back of the last

page of the map (the Jerusalem page), Matthew's own design for the Heptarchy of Britain (Fig. 8), a diagrammatic display of the seven original kingdoms of Britain labeled according to their legendary founding by the sons of Woden.34 This image begins the genealogy of the kings of England and flows into materials specifically written for St. Albans-the Easter table, in the form of a volvelle, followed by the calendar of St. Albans.35 Together, the map, the genealogy, the tables, and the calendar form a preface to the chronicle appropriate to its

production at St. Albans.36 In addition, Matthew Paris de-

picted his own audience in the figure of our monk arriving at the port of Acre (Fig. 9). As the only figure of the map to look out and engage the reader's attention, the eye-to-eye contact he instigates certainly begged the monastic viewer to identify

with him.37 Such identification was further enhanced by his monk's robe and the sail of the boat emblazoned with the shield of the Angevin kings immediately beneath him, which,

together, serve to specify him and the audience as monks from England. This figure of a monk guiding his boat to the

Holy Land stands as a metonymic figuration not only of those who looked at these maps but also, as we shall see later, how the maps were used.

A Sensate Vehicle for Imagined Pilgrimage Matthew Paris's itinerary, set before the Chronica majora in CCCC ms 26, invited its monastic readers to use its pages and

appended flaps as dynamic tools, and so engaged their bodies in practices that helped sustain an imagined pilgrimage in which the monastic soul could "fly across all the kingdoms of this world, and ... penetrate the depths of the eastern sky." The monk imitated the map's movements as he worked its

pages and flaps, and the multisensorial experience of that

working and the places it described constructed a performative setting in which the monk could realize an imagined pilgrimage to the Heavenly Jerusalem. The map, like monastic meditational exercises, cues the various senses of the body and thereby effectively draws its viewer into the spaces it

depicts.38 Medieval manuscripts are generally analyzed in terms of how they look, which limits their appreciation to only one of the senses, sight. But when we examine this map within the performative context of its own codex, we will see that

sight, sound, and touch all combine to make the experience of reading the map a richer, more bodily implicated activity. Indeed, Matthew himself invoked such a synesthetic appreciation of his own illustrations when he wrote in one of his Saints' Lives that he had drawn its images "so that what the ear hears, the eyes may see.""3

The layout of the itinerary elicits the viewer's and reader's sense of bodily position before the manuscript in a co- construction of its spaces as a vehicle for movement. The double passage laid down in each page (Fig. 1) narrows the

possible space for this movement and at the same time maintains a tension that creates that space.40 Travel times connect the cities and their immediate environs, and, to-

gether, cities and roads occupy an ambiguous space, at once

charged with the concreteness of their labels and limited

topography and abstracted from their surrounding geography by their ambivalent relationship to their frames. These frames, colored alternately in pink and blue (Fig. 5), lend focus and tension to their regions, creating a space of

suspended animation, a space that floats behind and beyond Matthew's drawn boundaries and the natural boundaries of

the book. The frames obscure buildings and towns behind them, so that the area shown is understood to continue past the frames; at the same time, the frames lift those regions out of their extension in the landscape and force our attention on the object so enframed.41 Towns at the base of passages, next to the viewer's body, are never obscured; they fully assert themselves as starting points for the passages' movements. By constricting the landscape to such a tight path, Matthew

effectively compressed vision toward the upper edge of the codex, the only point of relief to the confined passage. This

upper edge also becomes the horizon beyond which we



IMAG(;INEI)D PILGRIMAGE IN THIE ITINERARY MAPS OF MATTHEW PARIS 607

understand the journey to continue, either at the bottom of the right-hand strip or on the next page.42

The itinerary map does not begin with a representation of the abbey of St. Albans, as might seem fitting. Rather, the

journey starts with London, the likely first stopover on just about any trip from St. Albans. By representing not the place where the monk lives but where he is headed, this picture of

London, located next to the viewer's body, realizes at the very outset the desire of travel itself-to be somewhere else. In

addition, thisjourney begins with a particular construction of the city (Fig. 1), which encourages the viewer's entry into the

map by combining the familiar elements of the real and observable with imagined ones, so that the mimetic becomes an anchor for processes of imitation and projection. The mixed vantage points of London confound two views of the

city: from the side and from above. The first was observable and "real," grounding the very beginning of the journey in the concrete and mundane as it lay the foundation for

imagined movements. The city walls enframe a view that is

only possible from the north, the direction of St. Albans. The Tower (la tur) frames the city to the left, with Westminster

lying opposite, unlabeled, and, in the center, St. Paul's (Seint

pol); the viewer is thus situated on the north side of the

Thames, looking south. Across the river lies Lambeth Palace

(lamhet), with Southwark (Suuerc) and London Bridge (le punt de lundres) to the east.43 This, then, was the view that Matthew

Paris, or any monk of St. Albans, had of London's medieval

skyline."" And yet despite this "realism," Matthew readily changed the shape of the city, from its basic medieval square to a circular shape;45 the depiction is then able to embrace the width of the passage and invite the viewer into its spaces more

easily. An aerial view is the second component of this

compound view of London. In contrast to the side view, this

vantage must be an abstraction, an imaginative extrapolation from Matthew's own knowledge of the city. The itinerary's compound view of London then combines the "real" and the

imaginary, providing a more complete picture of the city in its dual vantage points.

London's curving walls embrace the width of the passage and form an eyelet through which the monk could enter the artifice of this passage's space and begin the journey. In the center of the oval, the famously tall spire of St. Paul's launches the journey through Cripplegate (Crupelgate) to the text of London's founding.16 As the monk sets out on hisjourney, the

text that is the road positions him in the world and tells him how long it would take to reach the next town. For example, just outside of London, the text reads: "One Day-the Road to Rochester [Jurnee-Le Chemin a Rouescestre]" and, on the

divergent path, "One Day-the road toward the coast and the sea [Jurnee-le chemin ver la costere et la mer]." In each instance, the text signifies that which it also visually creates-the

road-making more concrete the progress up the page in the

reading (aloud) of its words.47 Beginning with London, and

throughout the map's entirety, the design of these pages continually constructs movement away from the viewer, first toward Dover at the top edge of the codex, the horizon for that strip's journey, and then retracing the surface of the vellum, like a capital N, to return to the body at the base of the

right-hand column. From Wissant and Calais, two roads climb

again to the upper horizon, now at Beauvais (Beuveis).

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9 Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, Monk guiding his boat, detail of fol. 4r

In addition to this insistent bottom to top, left to right motion, Matthew deployed a calligraphic strategy, which further realizes the voyager's bodily passage across the vellum of the world (Fig. 2). In the lower right-hand corner of folio 1 verso and along this main route, he stretched out the letters of the word jurnee; this is the only text of the road and thus carries the greatest burden in its role as a sign of movement.

Here, Matthew quite purposefully attenuated the reading process to align it with the monks' projections of their bodies

up the vertical passages. In this sense, reading becomes movement and is itself a protracted endeavor, taking up time in sounding out the word: ju - -r - r -~r - - n - ee.

As soon as the itinerary moves south of the city of Paris, and so beyond the personal travel experience of Matthew Paris, inaccuracies creep in.48 Historians of cartography have under-

standably valued the accuracy of any map's contents, and those who have commented on Matthew Paris's maps have cited the pages that follow, those beyond the city of Paris, as

examples of the failure of mapmaking in the Middle Ages. Yet if we examine such artwork not for its accuracy of depiction but for the manner of that depiction-how effective it is in

shaping the places of the Latin West as phenomenal experiences-then this insistence on geographic precision evapo- rates.4" Rather than being a reliable guide to France, Italy, and




the Holy Land, the map was far more important to the St. Albans monk for what it presented to him as he imagined movements through the famous towns and Benedictine ab-

beys of the Latin West on his mental journey toward the

Heavenly Jerusalem. In other words, there is no "out of the

way" when you imagine ajourney. Thus, it made sense to have

Fleury (flurie), site of Saint Benedict's bones (Fig. 2), come between Chanceaux (Charceus) and Beaune on the way to

Lyons, even though it is actually located directly south of Paris.5o This map, like other medieval images, asks to be viewed as a mediator of experience. It was designed for a Benedictine audience by a fellow monk who, as far as we know, went abroad only once. The map and its active viewing were a site of exchange not of limited geographic knowledge but of monastic desire to reach for the HeavenlyJerusalem.

The itinerary offers two, sometimes three paths (Fig. 2). The main or central route took the monk through the major political and ecclesiastical cities of south England and France, traveling directly to Paris (fol. Iv, lower left), and then along the river Seine to Beaune; from there it accompanies the

Sa6ne River to Lyons, where it turns to the Alps and crosses at Mt. Cenis (Fig. 3; fol. 2r, upper right: le munt Senis kem passe ki va en lumbardie; Mt. Cenis, by whose pass one goes to

Lombardy). The peripheral routes, whose distances are less accurate, site major religious centers, most often with Benedic- tine houses. One such (on fol. Ir, Fig. 1) moves from Calais

through St-Omer, Arras, St-Quintin, and St-R6mi. At the city of Paris, the routes bifurcate again (fol. lv, Fig. 2), and one could travel along a more southerly route through Sens

(Sanz), Auxerre (Aucerre), V6zelay (Verzelai), and on to Lyons.51 Here it splits again (fol. 2r, Fig. 3), and one could continue

along the river Rh6ne (La Roone) to St-Giles (Seint Gile)-- either as a point of embarkation for the Holy Land or to enter

Italy along the coast. The towns that Matthew includes in his map, while often

simply convenient staging posts, were also goals of pilgrimage in their own right: Canterbury, Reims, St-Denis on the main

route, and Chartres, V6zelay, St-Giles on the peripheral routes. Pilgrimage thus comes to color the perceptions of the

itinerary; one is conducted along routes punctuated with the resonance of these holy sites, places made sacred through their possession of relics as well as the continued practice of

traveling to them. By bringing into a visual proximity towns and pilgrimage sites that are not otherwise close by, Matthew infuses into his itinerary associations of pilgrimage, where each place depicted could be viewed as one more marker of the larger theme of movement toward the center of Christian sacrality, Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre.52 The St. Albans monk, sitting before this itinerary, contemplating these cities and their relics as stages of pilgrimage toward Jerusalem, could not have failed to reflect on his own scrutiny and activation of the map as yet one more participant, one more microcosm in this larger pull towardJerusalem.

Complementing these sites, the routes deploy an embodied language that gives direction to the pilgrimage and makes more concrete allusions to their goal by insisting on a bodily orientation in terms of both the ultimate destination and in relation to the other routes on the page. From the beginning, the routes insist on the reader's movements toward the east

(vers orient). In addition, the routes tell the viewer where he is

relative to other places on the map. For example, at the far left of folio 1 verso (Fig. 2), this route reads, "a road to the left toward the east, which can rejoin the other, which is more to the right, but this road is closer to Germany."53 Multiple points of orientation-the east, the main route, and other

subsidiary routes, as well as the sites along the way--thus encourage the reader's movement along the path and keep that movement situated in terms not only of his body (left and

right) but also of his goal-Jerusalem.54 From the perspective of the reader situated thus within

these directions, the top edge of the page becomes the horizon of that leg of the journey, and these horizons formed the site for the active participation of the monk's viewing body as he turned the pages of the codex itself. Page turning, then, is another means of aligning the monk's body with the

manuscript; this alignment works to internalize the spaces of the map, which thereby more effectively cooperate in an

imagined pilgrimage. At these page turnings, the physicality of the monk's viewing body becomes an explicit form of

taking in the spaces of the Latin West. Each turning of the

page consumes its own crossing of space, because that space is not depicted but merely understood. In two of the three

turnings, that understood space is bordered with the depiction of a rugged landscape feature that acts as a barrier, providing a needed punctuation to the journey and at the same time relieving the itinerary of the necessity to depict actual passage across it. At the upper right of folio 2 recto

(Fig. 3) lies the hospital at the foot of Mt. Cenis (le hospital en

pe du munt).55 On the lower right of the next folio (Fig. 4), Susa (Suse) marks the resumed journey after the Alps have been crossed. That crossing is not depicted but only sug- gested, and, as with the traversing of the Mediterranean or the movement from Beauvais (Beuveis) to Beaumont (Beau- munt), that undepicted crossing comprises a day's journey. These disjunctures in continuous space thus marry the

physical act of page turning with the map's representation of movements through its space. Here then, in this lacuna of the route, in what is acted out but not depicted, lies a conjoining of the map and monk, making the monk's engagement with the map a blend of what he handles and what the routes become. Turning the page makes the map work.

This element of spatial consumption is something new to the version in CCCC ms 26. Comparison with an earlier version highlights Matthew's later design as one that makes the bodily participation in the codex an effective agent in the

production of an imagined journey. Another, less complete version of the itinerary is contained in Matthew Paris's Liber additamentorum, folios 183 verso and 184 recto (Fig. 10).56 Six passages are spread across a single bifolio opening, depicting the route from London to Otranto only. London is in the lower left, and central and peripheral routes climb the pages, always beginning with and proceeding away from the body. In this shorter sketch version, in contrast to the Chronica majora's itinerary, the routes do not always begin with a city or town, much less a topographical elaboration, like a river or mountain range. For example, at the top of the first passage, the route ends with the town of Beauvais (Beuveis) and continues at the bottom with Beamont-sur-Oise (Beaum-- e sur Eise), showing only the vaguest hint of the river Oise. In the middle two passages, the route terminates up top with Chamb~ry



IMAGINED PILGRIMAGE IN THEr ITINERARY MAPS OF MATTIIEW PARIS 609

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(Chamberei) and at the lower right begins with the text

jur-nee. Here, Matthew represents the spaces between the

passages, providing the transition to make movement continuous and obviating an active viewing in its construction.

In our CCCC ms 26, such continuity is replaced by the

bodily participation of the viewer in the activation of the map. Matthew stretched out these two pages to fit onto five pages, giving each a fairly definite beginning and end in some

topographic elaboration. For example, on folio 1 verso (Fig. 2), the route begins with Beaumont, showing, as in the British

Library's sketch, the river Oise. Here, however, that depiction takes up the width of the passage and marks more strongly the element of nature that must be overcome in traveling to the next city.57 On this and the next page, Matthew aligned topography with the codex breaks so that beginnings and

endings occur at points of topography-mountains, channel,

seas-precisely those features that do not fill the spaces of the

passages. Turning the page is thus constructed to consume the spaces between these features, further implicating the

body in its own kinesthetic understanding of the movement of the imagined journey.58 The body performs the movements

of the map as dictated by its codex format. In these move-

ments, directed toward major sites of pilgrimage and bodily oriented in their narrow passages, the monk internalized and imitated the map's movements as an effective realization of his desire to reachJerusalem.

Matthew's itineraries are unlike any other medieval map to

survive; they thus presented the monks of St. Albans with a

unique viewing experience. But such singularity does not mean there is no meaningful context in which to place the

reception of these materials. The preliminary materials in

many of Matthew's own manuscripts, including of course, the

maps, developed their readers' sense of bodily place before the codices as one of the fundamental practices by which their monastic audience encountered and came to understand them and the text and images that follow. In other

words, they habituated their readers' bodily responses to such

positioning as they taught their readers how to work them. Pierre Bourdieu's theorizing on the habitus allows us to examine the different, though practically related, contexts by which the monks of St. Albans would have been inured to the

maps' embodied manipulations.59 Bourdieu discusses the




habitus as "systems of durable, transposable dispositions." The habitus is composed of structures that are "always tending to reproduce the objective structures of which they are the

product." The practices born of these structures are not

adapted consciously toward a future goal but are rather part of a pliable, strategy-generating principle that allows agents to

cope with ever-changing situations. There are no rules,

explicit or implicit, that govern either the generation of the

strategy or the applicability of its practices; rather, since

practices tend to reproduce that which produces them, they are determined by the similarity of past practices to current conditions and the effectiveness of their deployment to meet those conditions. This similarity between past and present practice-producing circumstances is based on the degree of structural analogy that may obtain between them. The practices thus generated by these circumstances evince homolo-

gous structures; the practices are compelled by similar struc-

tures, even in diverse circumstances. Practices of book handling helped to form a habitus of

understanding place in which the body of the medieval viewer is first positioned before the manuscript as predicate to

working a given device or chart and then within the manu-

script's spaces as the reader manipulates its materials. Because the itinerary is a representation of the world's spaces, projection into the map places the body of the viewer in the world, and it does so through the mechanics of its operations and of the body's responses to them. The place of the viewer before the itinerary map becomes also the place of the body in the

world, and it is this "placeness" that is part of the performance of the map and its spaces as phenomenal experiences. These bodily practices of place, we might venture, are the

thirteenth-century precursor to later devotional or pilgrimage practices in which the reader of a pilgrim's guide, for

example, is asked to map out his or her home with the

imported dimensions of the topography of the Holy Land. In these guides, the Holy Sepulchre is described as nine palms long and three and a half wide and standing four palms above the ground; the Chapel of Mary Magdalene is ten paces from the Sepulchre. Above measurements like these, so solicitous of the reader's body, one author wrote, "these are the

journeys that pilgrims ought to make ... and that every person can do, staying in his own house and thinking of each

place that is written below."'6 Jonathan Z. Smith, who brings the work of humanist

geographers to bear on questions of ritual, argues that it is

through the agency of our bodies that we create place. "It is the relationship to the human body, and our experience of it, that orients us in space, that confers meaning to place. Human beings are not placed, they bring place into being."61' The construction of place by a body is a concept very much at the center of medieval practices of geography. In a treatise on mathematics and science (but concerned mostly with the location of Paradise), Roger Bacon (ca. 1220-1292) wrote, "Place is the principle of our generation, and in the same way as a father."62 Bacon's sense of place is one that is infused with the strictly ordered Neoplatonic relationship between the macrocosm and the microcosm.63 The various forces of the macrocosm resound and reverberate down through the

spheres, falling as an inverted pyramid and determining the character and quality of that "place" and the people who

inhabit it. "Placeness" on our "orb" registers the larger macrocosm, and this link between the two was investigated for what either one said of the other. These theoretical specula- tions are explicitly acknowledged in some of the book-

handling practices that activate books by Matthew Paris, though they are not overtly explained or discussed. In fact, their obscurity and erudition were important factors in

having readers accept the authority of some of these books to mediate this sense of place.

Neither the itinerary maps nor any of the other preliminary materials of the Chronica majora contain explicit instructions on their use or on how the monk was to approach and understand them. Rather, they were things that were "learned

by doing"; that is, their audience had to generate by practice effective ways to manipulate and operate the materials. In this

sense, the manuscript becomes a self-generating instrument of instruction, a tool that creates its own scenario of "learning by doing." As Bourdieu remarked of the world of objects, "every made product-including symbolic products such as works of art, games, myths, etc.-exerts by its very function-

ing, particularly by the use made of it, an educative effect which helps to make it easier to acquire the dispositions necessary for its adequate use."64 The different preliminary materials of the Chronica majora (including the itinerary) all

similarly informed each other of a sense of bodily place because that sense of place was conditioned by homologous practices necessary for the operations of these materials.

The Heptarchy that immediately follows the itinerary (Fig. 8) engages in spatializations that begin with the reader's body. Its regions of England all extend from a formal, frontal image of Alfred the Great, founder and uniter of England, an image that sits at the head of a genealogy. Rather than leave it as a

simple schema, as he did in another chronicle,65 Matthew

manipulated the viewer's sense of place before it when he oriented the image to have east at the top and disposed the

regions of England around the king accordingly: East Anglia and Essex are in the east and Kent and Sussex are in the south. This arrangement differs from the normal order given to these sons of Woden by Roger Wendover, Matthew's

predecessor, whose chronicle Matthew edited and copied out for the early portions of the Chronica, and, moreover, follows traditional medieval maps by placing east at the top.66 Like the image of the monk guiding his boat to port, this figure of

King Alfred looks directly out at the viewer in a space made

"virtually continuous" with his own.67 The St. Albans viewer, working from the image of Alfred at the center to the regions located at his periphery, could thus comprehend the founda- tional myth of England's unity and, at the same time, understand his geographic orientation in that nation through the emplotment of his horizon with the unifying narrative of its origins.

The volvelle (Fig. 11) is another of the Chronica majora's prefatory materials whose practices shared in the generation of a habitus of place. The practices of the volvelle incorporated the user's body as part of its operational mechanics, evoking a sense of place before the manuscript. A volvelle is a separate disk of vellum that was attached by a pin to the base folio so that it could be freely rotated.68 In the thirteenth century, it was often used as a tool, in the manner of a computus, to help determine the date of Easter, other movable feasts, Sunday



IMA(;INEDI) PIGRIMAGE IN THE ITINERARY MAPS OF MATITI"W IPARIS 611

letters, and so on.6'1 The compulus was a table of dates that allowed the monk, through intercolumnation, to coordinate the lunar year with the solar year and determine the proper dates for liturgical celebrations. These tables were often

presented as rotae, or wheels, to convey the recurrent character of their nineteen-year cycle.7" However, their use as rotaein the codex was made awkward by their presentation as static

diagrams; the book itself had to be turned around to read the numbers. It was this problem of handling the codex that Matthew Paris solved with his use of the volvelle, for his is the earliest instance of a volvelle that I have located.71 His volvelle allowed the monk to handle the Chronica majora as a machine that engaged his bodily position; the monk turned this disk to

align it with his body, making it easier to read the dates.

Turning the attached disk to match his body meant that the monk manipulated the book relative to his body, making him that much more cognizant of his bodily relation to the

manuscript, even as he negotiated this chart of temporal events.72

The dating of Easter was not solely a question of time; as a

floating feast day, it depended on the observations of the heavens and an understanding, if only rudimentary, of the earth's position relative to the sun. In this use, the volvelle has been characterized as a two-dimensional astrolabe;73 it did not coordinate latitude or altitude but nonetheless fixed time relative to its viewer, and that time was always based on an

implicit understanding of the cosmic order.74 The use of the volvelle for this indirect coordination of place with astronomy was an appropriate, if novel, inclusion in the prefatory material of this manuscript.

The habitus generated by and generating the practices of these prefatory materials required the reader of Matthew's Chronica majora to understand his bodily position before the book as predicate to the production of their possible mean-

ings. Another manuscript by Matthew Paris, a Book of Fate, while an altogether different kind of book nonetheless still

depended on homologous practices of bodily positioning. This Book of Fate, which was available to his brethren, is reminiscent of both the itinerary, in its depictions of cityscapes, and the Chronica majora, in its use of a volvelle. It thus cued his audience to think about and use those items in ways similar to the Chronica majora's.75

Around 1250 to 1255, a period contemporary with his

mapmaking, Matthew Paris copied out and illustrated his

Book of Fate, which is now housed in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (ms Ashmole 304).7" Medieval Books of Fate are

compilations of divination or fortune-telling tracts; the monk asked the book a question about his future, worked its devices, and took ajourney through charts to receive an answer at the

end.77 Condemned by some churchmen, they nonetheless

grew in popularity from the mid-twelfth century through to the Renaissance.78 The most popular text, the Liber experimen-

tus, was most often attributed to the twelfth-century mathema- tician Bernard of Silvestris, while accompanying texts were attributed to renowned ancient authors: Socrates, Pythagoras, or Anaxagoras, for example. Much of the appeal of Books of Fate depended on the authority resonating in these names from antiquity.7'' Moreover, some of the texts' origins in Arabic language, their specific invocations of distant, exotic lands of the East, and their convoluted machinations imbued

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11 Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, Volvelle, CCCC ms 26, fol. 5r (photo: By Permission of the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge)

these books with a power to mystify, which, in turn, sustained belief in their efficacy.0o An audience's understanding of the book as a generative machine, as well as the places it took

them, gave credence to the answer the book furnished about its users' futures.8'

Matthew's Book of Fate effectively thematizes (and manipulates) its users' sense of bodily position as a means to take its readers on a journey to a different geographic place. These

manipulations are an important element in this potent (and condemned) search of future time, and are like the itinerary, the Easter volvelle, and the Heptarchy in the repositioning of its viewer. Geography, the writing of places in the world, is the

subject of the first image of this manuscript. The book opens with two figures (Fig. 12) whose ancient wisdom combines with contemporary technologies of mapping and together authorize not only the tract they illustrate but the Book of Fate in general. Beneath the image is a prologue describing the subject matter of the texts as "the effect and efficacy of the moon and other planets and of the constellations, which they exert upon inferior things."82 On the left of the image sits

Euclid, who holds in his left hand a spy tube83 and in his right, a zonal map of the world. At right, Herman Contractus of Reichenau displays, in the very center of the image and

prominently labeled in red ink, an astrolabe, whose invention was attributed to him.84 Descending between the two, like so

many infusions of the holy in medieval illumination, is an

opening into the heavens at which both figures gaze intensely. Together, these features-noble personages, zonal map, spy tube, astrolabe, and gazing figures-signify so many means of

locating, first, position and, by extrapolation from the trea- tises these figures preface, future time.

The zonal map and astrolabe, both contemporary instruments of mapping that Matthew added to his depiction of these astrological personages, foreground the notion of

present geographic position. The zonal map, which Euclid



612 ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 1999 VOLUME I.XXXI NUMBER 4

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12 Matthew Paris, Book of Fate, Euclid and Hermanus. Oxford, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, ms Ashmole 304, fol. 2v (photo: By Permission of the Bodleian Library)

holds forth on a handled device, is drawn to resemble the

many mirrors of the time and so "reflects" the world before this image. The map divides the world into habitable and uninhabitable parts, a division likely borrowed from Macro- bius.85 Matthew had elsewhere elaborated on this kind of zonal map when he depicted the different spheres that surround the "inferior" Earth, giving more concrete instantiation to the cosmology implicit in the tract's prologue and

explicit in Roger Bacon.86 Euclid, staring at the heavens and at once displaying the world, authenticates that cosmology by acting as the conduit through whom the events that take place in his right hand are adumbrated in those seen through his left. This image thus makes reading the future a question not

only of knowing the stars but also of knowing how those stars relate to one's position.

The issue of a body's position is made especially evident in the astrolabe, a measuring device that required of the observer a knowledge of his latitude, that is, his position on the world, in order to work the mechanism and properly chart the changing positions of the stars.87 The astrolabe, in fact, demanded a complex negotiation among the variables of

time, latitude, and a star's altitude, any two of which had to be known for the third to be determined. As the first image of the book, "illustrating" the prologue below, these two figures and the instruments they use to determine place and which

they so prominently display become both origin and personi- fication of the texts and the processes by which the Benedic- tine monk of St. Albans sought to know his future.88

Matthew's Book of Fate makes particular use of the same devices that animate the prefatory materials of his Chronica

majora-the volvelle and cityscapes. The Prenostica Socratis Basilei is one of its texts of prognostication, and, like the

itinerary, the Prenostica uses similar depictions of cities to evoke a sense of distant places in the minds of its viewers. In the tract, cityscapes illustrate the pages of charts called the

"spera civitatum," where they become signs of the exotic

places that help the reader locate his future in response to his

question. In addition, Matthew included a volvelle in the book as one of the key devices for generating the initial code to that future. Together, cityscape and volvelle were devices familiar

enough to the monks who sought to know their fate."9

This tract answered its readers' questions by means of

complex, interactive procedures that sought to combine what the monk was thinking about with a journey through the

spaces of its charts of answers. Initially, this book lacked any sort of instructions for its often complicated procedures; thus, the book, like the maps themselves and so many other medieval devices, was a thing that was "learned by doing." Fortunately, a later fourteenth-century hand wrote some instructions that boldly underscore the monk's belief in the

power of the codex to transport its user to distant places and times. The inscription tells the reader to "first take your noumber in the Cerkelle [the volvelle], sodenly thynkyng on the question." Having spun the volvelle and generated a

number, the petitioner moved on to a table, which led him to another table, and finally a third table, which in turn gave him a new number and a "spera," or circle, in which to search for an item.90 For example, he might be told to search in the circle of fruits for the entry under "fig." Once there, he was told to proceed to one of the "spera civitatum" (Fig. 13), where a judge who rules over a region or city told him his future.9" These purposely complex maneuvers through charts and circles are part of the mystifying effect of the tract and function at a primary level to relocate the place and time of its

petitioner as they move him from the here and now of his

present mental disposition before the book to a distant place of the book's construction, a place where he is able to learn his future.92

All of the devices of this Book of Fate, both actual-the

volvelle, the tables, and the spheres of cities-and depicted- the zonal map, the spy tube, the astrolabe-engage practices that are homologous with the itinerary's in their creation and

manipulation of a bodily understanding of geographic (and cosmological) position. Moreover, the shared motif of the

cityscape triggered associations between the Books of Fate and the itinerary, and their rather specialized skills of han-

dling further associated the two. We should therefore understand these devices, their operations, and their meanings to have circulated in the same orbit of physical manipulations and intellectual associations of spaces and times as the

itinerary. But more than this, examination of this Book of Fate has highlighted again how Matthew foregrounded "placeness" of a body as a feature essential to the operation of these books.



IMAGINED PILGRIMAGE IN THE ITINERARY MAPS OF MATTIIEW PARIS 613

The Book as Exegetical Machine Sensate cues, embodied language, and practices of book

handling provided the contexts where practical skills of bodily orientation taught the monks of St. Albans how to address themselves to these maps. In the pages depicting Italy (Figs. 4, 5), however, such explicit descriptions of bodily movements

explain only part of the itinerary's actual workings. The

dynamic possibilities of the added flaps and how they inflect the route called for a more intellectual understanding that coordinated their manipulations with the spaces they depict. Medieval mnemonic practices provided these idealist, as

opposed to bodily, understandings and sustain an explanatory model that can account for some of the different possible readings of these pages. Exploring these practices, we will see that Matthew's use of the attached flaps and the manipulations they encourage, along with his vivid, multisensorial,

bodily motivated designs, instantiated as a working reality the machina universitatis made popular by Hugh of St. Victor and

thoroughly incorporated in the monastic practices of ars

memorativa. Not only were Matthew Paris and the St. Albans

community aware of the guiding ideas behind these practices, but their mode of recollection also called for almost exactly the kind of interior mental wanderings that I think these

maps encouraged in their monastic audience. On folios 2 verso and 3 recto (Figs. 4, 5), the itinerary opens

up to a broad view of the Italian peninsula. The map's design, in its variety and mulitplicity of images, texts, and dynamics, here offers new and different means of engaging its spaces. From the Alpine mountains at the base of the first passage (lower left) to the different points of access to the Holy Land

depicted at the tip of Italy (upper right), the whole of the

peninsula is, all at once, laid before the viewer. Cities continue to progress up the page, here in a staggered succession.

Occasionally topography provides information to aid the viewer-mountain cities take middle positions, coastlines define the straight and immediate, or, most obviously, the river Po, at the left, replaces the road and connects the

important cities of northern Italy. As these pages open up to reach the Mediterranean Sea, their basic layout and the

design of their routes continued to maintain the monks'

progression to the Holy Land, doing so through the dynamic possibilities of the codex as a working tool.

Paris makes greatest use of the codex's potential as a

machine that engages the viewer's body at exactly the point where the route seems to have dissolved and where other

scholars have described a decisive breakdown in geographic knowledge-on the right-hand side of this bifolio opening (that is, fol. 3r). When the monk turned to this page, he encountered the appended flaps depicting Rome and Sicily not open, which would make them susceptible to damage, but folded into the space of southern Italy (Fig. 14). This

probable configuration of the flaps reinvents the itinerary; the flaps obscure portions of the Italian peninsula, which

encouraged the viewing monks to pursue more directly the

top horizon of the codex format by moving from Siena (Sene), at the base of the middle, truncated passage, to Florence

(florence), and Sutri (Sutre), and then pass over the frame to the coastal cities, where they could proceed in the quickened cadence of cityscapes from what may be Lecce (Lientee) to Otranto (Ortrente) at the uppermost edge.93 This movement

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up the page is not without its own obstacles-the frame that cuts across the passage above Sutri-but just as one has to cross the mountains of central Italy to follow this route

physically, so the map encourages movements across its own boundaries.94 The flap's restructuring of these spaces trans- lates the frame into a means of replacing the Apennines. This frame functions then as a transition between two discontinu- ous spaces. But it also works as a kind of ellipsis, indicating a

disjuncture in space, and this disjuncture itself is made

possible in the different positions of the flaps. The flaps' closed position creates movement across the spaces that they themselves cover up; it is thus similar to the consumption of

space effected by turning pages. The flaps further restructure the pilgrimage by underlining

and obscuring two textual passages that continue to direct the monk to Jerusalem. Along the coastal cities that lead to Otranto, the point of embarkation for the Holy Land, are two sets of texts.95 Both are written sideways and are underscored and supported by the right-hand flap (Fig. 14).96 The first text, in rubric, is fully legible, while the other text, at the sign 0, is partially obscured and would not be fully legible until the

flaps have been opened. To read either of these sideways texts, however, the reader had to turn the book or himself move around the codex. The first, full text reads:

Toward the Sea of Venice and toward Constantinople and on this coast are these cities which are so far away. The first is Otranto, which is at the head of Apulia, and after, one finds the first good city which one finds in Apulia toward the March of Ancona.97

This text, like the insistent "vers orient" of the routes, points beyond itself. It does not say where it is but where it and the reader are headed. In this, it combines two sorts of language:



614 ART BULLETIN DE(CEMBER

1999 VOL()IUME IXXXI NUMBER 1

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the language of the prescription that presumes a subject in the second person-"you are moving toward the Sea of Venice"-and the deictic language of the label-"on this coast are. .. ." In both voices, their authorship, their source in the person of Matthew Paris is erased, infusing an independent authority and geographic knowledge to the map itself- erased because Matthew Paris nowhere asserts authority, personal or otherwise, for the spaces he depicts, and this lack of acknowledgment leaves the burden of the map's own

genesis, its genealogy, to its own design. The fact that the map works validates its creation and allows it to become the ultimate repository of the means to negotiate its own spaces. The origins of its mechanisms, like the self-effacing structures of the habitus, are covered over.'98 Together, these languages, the map, and its voices insist on the reader's place, a location that is made relative to famous cities that lie both beyond the

map and beyond himself: "which are so far away [ki sunt ci esestres].""9 The map underscores verbally what it has under- lined visually by reminding the monk of his remove from what is not shown but is still incorporated in the suggestion of the route's position. Working with the flaps and other parts of the

map, the monk moved himself toward his goal, a goal that was far away from his physical self but growing nearer in his movements through the map.

The legible portion of the second text, next to "Bar seint Nicholas" and at the sign 0, reads: "This is the route to Acre

through Apulia having arrived at the head of Apulia. This is to

say at Otranto which is towards. ...

."100 The monk would have been drawn to this fragment of a text by the repetition of the

sign 0 at the boat leaving Otranto, as well as the reiteration of that town as the point of embarkation to the Holy Land. In

addition, this partial text signals the multiple associations that




the monks of St. Albans could have made with these maps. The text labels the route. It works in concert with the sign next to the boat and the other label, "port de mer" (seaport), and references also those places toward which the monk travels. The goal for this text is Acre, the landing site of so

many pilgrims and, after 1244, the last stronghold of the Crusader states. For the lay or noble visitor to the abbey, the destination of Acre may have served as a reminder of the

Crusades; their activations of the map might have served as one form of participation in those increasingly frequent expeditions. For the monk of St. Albans, the goal of Acre

provides a point from which to contemplate the higher, spiritual goal of the HeavenlyJerusalem, depicted as the final terminus of the road and "the goal of any and all pilgrims."'101 Yet the text continues to position the reader relative to other

places in the map. In a sense, this text also visualizes the route that has been lost in the working of the flap (that is, the route

through Apulia). Here, however, that route is no longer a road or a series of cities; it becomes, at the sign 0, a boat and its path through the Mediterranean-but not even a route so much as a sign of route making. We will return to Matthew's use of signs momentarily.

One of the most prominent themes developed by the intersection of these flaps and their content is the imminent

Apocalypse, the end of the world transposed into the spaces occupying the monk's imagination. The top of the right-hand flap (Fig. 14) describes the Nation of Gog and Magog trapped behind the quarter circle of the Caspian Mountains; at the same time, the flap obscures the regions of Rome and Apulia. Elsewhere, Matthew had interpreted the contemporary Tatar invasions of eastern Europe as the Nation of Gog and Magog let loose on the Christian West, relying on reports of their destructions as portents of a coming end to the world.102

Turning contemporary events toward their fulfillment at the end of time exemplifies quite clearly the religious, even sacred character of medieval chronicle writing. Matthew's text behind the mountains equates Gog and Magog with the Jews (a common medieval confusion), who, it says, "will issue forth before the Day ofJudgment and openly massacre all manner of people."'03 This flap, folded into Italy, brings these fears home, so to speak, making such invasions a physical reality in southern Italy: just as these peoples were invading the eastern extremes of Christendom, so their graphic representation physically impinges on the spaces of Latin Christendom.104

In addition to the apocalypticism of Gog and Magog, the flap underscored for the monk the central location of that event, Jerusalem, as the ultimate destination of the monk's

pilgrimage, one located in the future, beyond the present bifolio opening of the map. The text just outside the mountains, at the extreme right edge of the folio's present configuration, describes a position north and east of Jerusalem: "C'est par[ ]t de vers bise regard de Ierusalem mais mut est loing vers northest de Acre e de Ierrusalem" (This part is toward the north in regard to Jerusalem, but is a very great distance to the northeast of Acre and of Jerusalem).105

Although confusing from the perspective of the flap folded over, this small, rather nondescript portion of text sits opposite Otranto, the final point of embarkation for the Holy Land. The closed flap thus physically and thematically inte- grates the goal of the pilgrimage-Jerusalem-into the re-

gion of southern Italy, erasing the space separating southern

Italy from the Holy Land. The folding flap has the effect of

bending geographic space, warping it to bring into closer

alignment both the motivation of moving towardJerusalem- the imminent end of the world-and the means of getting there-the manipulations of the map as a workable tool.

The smaller, triangular flap attached at the top of the page represents the island of Sicily and produces its own inflections of sacred history and geography. By folding out the side flap, the monks at St. Albans encountered Sicily folded down into

Italy, in a position legible only from this side of folio 3. And, having pulled away the layer of apocalypticism of the right- hand flap, that is, the Nation of Gog and Magog, the reader is confronted by yet another one-Mount Etna, at the center of

Sicily, said by the text to be a gaping Mouth of Hell (Fig. 15).106 The final judgment, implicit in the map's allusions to the Apocalypse, is made explicit in its geographic depiction of Hell's entrance in this flap.107 By layering over the region of

Apulia with legend, history, and eschatology, Matthew Paris set in place a system that allowed for different ways to

generate multiple meanings. Like medieval techniques of

memory, the monk could produce his own movements between the different places and times of Christendom by easily flipping through the appendages of this map in what- ever succession he liked.

Medieval mnemonic practices developed mental habits

homologous to the pliable and cooperative system of meaning- producing movements generated through the workings of these flaps. Ars memorativa called first for the construction of a

personal system of recollection founded on the same kinds of multisensorial image building that Matthew used in his

maps.108 Once the images had been constructed, their manipulation into different meaning-producing groups performed an operation similar to the flaps and their reconfiguration of

space. In Hugh of St. Victor's treatise De arca Noe mystica, of which two twelfth-century copies were in the library at St. Albans,109 Hugh constructed a mental picture of Noah's Ark as a machina universitatis, a tool that facilitates the storage and retrieval of not just information but also of the associative

meanings that derive from the combination and recombina- tion (collectio) of the different chambers of the Ark. Hugh's Ark is more than a memory aid; it used processes of memory in a flexible, open-ended system of exegesis, one designed to

bring its practitioners to higher, more mystical levels of

understanding. Beginning with the concretely historical, the goal was the preparation of the heart for the "peace of divine indwelling," as Beryl Smalley so ably described it.110 Hugh proceeds pictorially, for pictures are closer signs of things than words, and it is the matter of the world that has the

greatest significance in God's originary speech."' Like Mat- thew with his itinerary and makers of other medieval maps, Hugh also glossed a geographic understanding of the Bible with a historical one, laying concrete, literal foundations for an ultimately spiritual journey."2 As Mary Carruthers notes, Hugh's Ark becomes a "geographical-historical-moral mappa mundi," and the visual scheme that Hugh builds of the Ark was designed to lead to greater and more nuanced understandings of the Christian mysteries.

How Hugh described the Ark and how it was used are two of our most explicit references to negotiating imagined space.



616 ART BUIILETIN I)ECEMBER 1999 VOLUME IXXXI NUMBER 4

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Hugh described the Ark as both a flat plane (seen from

above) and an elevation (from the side). Having constructed in his mind's eye striking or vivid images associated with

specific ideas, and having set these against particular back-

grounds, in this case the rooms of the Ark, Hugh then moved between both kinds of projections, ever recombining different biblical passages and events for their interpretative potential. As the individual moves between two different mental projections of space, therefore negotiating an imagined, three-dimensional environment, recollection of the materials becomes its own form of an imagined journey. The

only significant difference between such a system and the

itinerary maps as I have analyzed them is that the former is based on mental images constructed by the individual monk. In this sense the map becomes an exteriorized version of

Hugh's machina universitatis. In the itinerary map, Matthew has provided a general schema to follow, leaving the specifics of which routes and how to turn the flaps up to the user. Both Matthew's and Hugh's systems thus created greater under-

standing of the ideas and associations lodged in their represen- tational spaces, and they did so without strictly enumerating those meanings. In other words, the system created the

possibilities of different interpretations without setting those

interpretations forth."3 There were multiple avenues by which Matthew Paris came

to know the ideas of Hugh of St. Victor. We know from his own

account of the abbacy of John in his Gesta abbatum that Matthew considered an effective memory remarkable and a

worthy attribute of a pious abbot."" As mentioned, there existed in the twelfth century two copies of Hugh of St. Victor's works at St. Albans, both containing Hugh's De arca Noe mystica, as well as his De archae mysticae descriptione. Surviving correspondence between St. Albans and St. Victor

(recorded by Matthew Paris in his Gesta abbatum) shows that there was a close connection in the mid-twelfth century between the abbeys, especially their scriptoria."5 In one of the letters, Abbot Simon of St. Albans requested from Richard of St. Victor copies of works by Hugh so that St. Albans could make a compilation that was both accurate and comprehen- sive. It seems more than likely that one of these St. Albans

copies is a product of this request. "6

Other, more practical connections provide an even richer trace of Matthew's Victorine borrowings. Both Suzanne Lewis and Michael Clanchy have interpreted the many signs and

symbols (the sign 0, for example) that decorate the margins of the Chronica majora and other histories as elaborations of Ralf de Diceto's system of signa."117 Diceto, dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in the late twelfth century, used signa to index his charters and his other histories, transforming them into a

system that was then easier to use. At the same time, these

signa provided a means by which the manuscript came alive to




the viewer, became more memorable. In one of his histories, Diceto himself explained his signs: "you will find certain signa placed in the margin. Do not immediately conclude that this is in any way superfluous, for they are there tojog the memory more easily and are very convenient."118 His phrase "jog the

memory [ad memoriam excitandum]" is the same one that

Hugh of St. Victor used, and Diceto quotes Hugh's treatise on

memory almost verbatim in his chronicle and in his statutes of St. Paul's Cathedral.119 Moreover, in his system of signa Diceto

gave concrete visualization to Hugh's advice to "imprint on the memory through the imagination [per imaginationem]" (that is, through the building of images) when he wrote: "here begin the images of histories [ymagines historiarum], which Ralf de Diceto dean of London has put into order."120 Diceto had studied at Paris and probably heard there Hugh's lectures on memory; it seems then that his own signa are a

borrowing from this tradition. While it is debatable that Matthew had studied in Paris, these ideas were certainly available to him through the histories of Ralf de Diceto. Roger Wendover had used Diceto's chronicle for his own history for the period from Creation to 1202.121 In addition, a fine copy with both Diceto's Abbreviationes chronicorum and his Imagines historiarum was held at St. Albans, and pages that display Diceto's indexical signa also contain notes in Matthew's

handwriting.122 These signa not only operate as devices of memory, they

also help to organize and cross-reference material within the chronicle itself, making the chronicle an effective tool for the

comprehension of Christian history. But these are really two sides of the same coin, for the operation of a good memory system depended on both vividness and organization for its

efficacy as a machina universitatis.123 Matthew Paris adopted much of Diceto's system and thereby realized some of the Victorine tradition that had been operating at his abbey for some time. Given Matthew's ease of access to the works of

Hugh of St. Victor and his use of Diceto's signa, there can be little doubt that he was tapping a rich source of ideas for ways to make his manuscripts work.

With its flaps extended (Figs. 4, 5), the multiple readings of this bifolio opening in the Chronica majora, and therefore its

multiple locational strategies, replace the obvious priority given to any one route. Yet texts and images continue to guide the pilgrim to the boat at Otranto. That movement remains the goal of these strategies is signified quite plainly in Matthew's rendering of a man and his pack animal crossing the empty space above Arezzo (aresce) in the lower right-hand corner of this passage (Fig. 5). The hooded figure raises his arms in a self-referencing gesture and crosses the wilderness between cities as an illustration of what one does in this space. In this sense, he becomes an icon to be imaginatively imitated by the cloistered monks of St. Albans.

Moving from right to left, his direction mirrors the movement of the flap and brings the monk back from the extreme right of the page to the now revealed open space of central Italy. From there the monk could either follow the cities up this passage to the text in its center or move to the flap and read of Rome and its ancient founding. In either event, the outcome returns the monk to Otranto and does so by means of signa, that key device of these manuscripts' mechanics. Following the first possibility, the passage through central

Italy took the monk through Viterbo (Biterbe), Perugia (peruse, la cite la poste), Assisi (Asise u seint francist gist), Sutri (Sutre), Foligno (fulnis), and finally the towns of La Martre and Spoleto, marked as the "entrance to

Apulia.'"124 Above this is inscribed the same text that we encountered next to Otranto, here with a most interesting preface:

At this sign, 4 above, where the ship is painted, at such a sign is the route to Acre in Apulia. That is to say as far as Otranto, which is toward the Sea of Venice, the closest city to Acre in Apulia. On the other route by sea to arrive at the place of the house of the patriarch of Acre, are islands. The first, Messina, and one leaves Sicily at the left and Malta at the right, which is [off] the Barbary Coast. Then one finds Crete. And then there is Cyprus at the left.125

This direct communication with the user of these maps emphatically underscores the role of signs to negotiate space, especially as Matthew placed this text in the middle of the page, ensuring that the monk come across it and know then how to get from southern Italy to the Holy Land. Reading the text arrests movement through the landscape and refers the reader to an immediate passage out of it. The label for Apulia-"Ci est la terre de poille (This is the land of Apulia) "-visually disrupts the word enseigne and frames its latter half, seigne, between the two signs: 4 and the outlined label poille. On the one hand is the place where one is, Apulia, on the other is the place where one is to go, to the sign 4 with its added trail signifying its own directed movement. In between is the word seigne.

At the upper left of this passage, running sideways, at the

sign 0 and next to "Bar seint Nicholas," this text is repeated almost verbatim.'26 In its repetition and in the multiplication of its signa lie still more signification of the route. Matthew ensured that his readers came across this text, its signs, and the route that they work so hard to maintain. And this overdetermination involves, at its most basic level, the position of the body of the viewer. Next to the boat and to the sideways text lies the repeated sign a, now on its side, which then matches the sign 0 when the monk has turned the book to read the text and follow its directions to the boat. Making the orientation of the sign 0 thus match bodily position implicates the reader's body as part of the semiotic system of

reading one's passage out of Italy. By signs, the map negotiated the monk's physical, bodily position as it encouraged his mental movements toward Otranto, the critical point of embarkation. Signs keep the momentum of the pilgrimage alive, all the while reminding the monk of how he was situated relative to them and therefore to the book and the spaces it represents.

Such bodily positioning is also thematized as the means to achieve the Holy Land in yet another passage, this time around the periphery of the page. From the text of Rome's founding in the appended flap, the monk could enter the city through the gate marked "the gate toward Lombardy [ la porte vers lumbardi]" and exit its match at the left marked "the gate toward Apulia [la por[t]e de vers poille]" (Fig. 5).'127 From the city he could move into Apulia and southern Italy and seek the western coast, encountering yet more text leading him to the Holy Land: "This coast is the coast of Calabre and is on




the sea to the Orient."'28 Continuing down that coast, the city sketches intrude into more sideways text, now made acces- sible with the flap opened:

The other route by sea to arrive at the place of the house of the Patriarch of Acre are islands. The first is by Messina and leaves Sicily to the left. And Malta[?] to the right which is the Coast of Barbarie. After this, one finds Crete and then

Cypress. 129

Immediately below the island of Sicily, two boats sail from

right to left through the Strait of Messina (Fig. 5),130 leaving Sicily to join the other route from Otranto to Acre. Like the directions of this other route, the placement of text sideways requires the reader to move around the book yet keep his

body oriented toward Otranto. And it is in the midst of these

shifting directions, of what is east and what is left, that the

points of embarkation combine in the departing boat, neces-

sarily to the left of Sicily and toward Otranto. A background of water frames this boat, crosses the

boundaries of the codex format, and invites the monk to turn the page, simultaneously crossing the Mediterranean Sea. The Mediterranean is not depicted, but its passage is mim- icked in this act of page turning. Once it is turned (Figs. 6, 7), we immediately confront the square-walled, colorfully inscribed city of Heavenly Jerusalem. The viewer/reader assumes a position within the topography, while his vantage point is from above. The city walls of Acre cross the codex at its binding and extend to the very bottom of the page, embracing the viewer's stationary position. While the labels and directions of the itinerary had been in the vernacular of Old French, when the monk arrived at Jerusalem, he confronted texts in the elevated language of Latin. This movement from a low to a high language repeats the stylistic antithesis used in other twelfth-century mystical tracts.131 In this sense-one parallel to reading geography as a religious expression of the Divine Plan-Jerusalem may be said to fulfill the promise of the journey begun in the mundane city of London.

In the end, though, our physical journey through and

arrival from the previous pages are more convincingly and

charmingly emblematized in the figure of the cowled monk who looks out at the viewer from the stern of the smallest boat

on the Jerusalem page (Fig. 9), undoubtedly signaling the

pilgrim's arrival in the Holy Land. His pose and isolated

position in the boat become emblematic of not only how he

got there but also how the monk of St. Albans did as well. He steers the boat with his left hand, his right elbow resting on the rudder while his right hand cups his chin and supports a countenance of contemplation and repose. Again, as the only figure in the map to look out and engage the viewer, his gaze begs the viewer's identification with him. In this one small

image, a gesture of contemplation is aligned with one of

controlling and directing movements. In the context of my study, this lone but rather captivating figure becomes a telling visualization of how the map and monk worked together in the production of mental movements towardJerusalem.

The itinerary map of Matthew Paris's Chronica majora constructed a setting wherein its monastic viewer and those materials he manipulated cooperated in the production of an

imagined pilgrimage to a complex site of Jerusalem. By working the map and its attachments, the monks at St. Albans could fulfill the desires voiced in their meditations and "fly across all the kingdoms of this world, and ... penetrate the

depths of the eastern sky," to gaze upon, finally, the Heavenly Jerusalem. The dynamic interactivity required of these pages and their images, long overlooked or ignored in the teleologi- cally constructed histories of medieval art, was not especially unusual in Matthew's corpus of materials. The map required at least some familiarity with skills and practices that similarly manipulated the practitioners' sense of time and place; this

essay has explored the most immediate contexts by which Matthew's audience would have appreciated those workings. How many other medieval works of art, one wonders, are

composed of mobile parts, the working of which helped to fashion their meanings with and for their users?

Daniel Connolly received his Ph.D. in art history from the University of Chicago in 1998. He is currently working on a book that explores the theme of imagined pilgrimage in the art of Matthew Paris [1904 West Kistler Rd., Scottville, Mich. 49454].

Frequently Cited Sources

CCCC ms 26: Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, ca. 1250, vol. 1, Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, ms 26.

Black, William H., A Descriptive, Analytical and Critical Catalogue of the Manu-

scripts Bequeathed unto the University of Oxford by Elias Ashmole (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1845).

Carruthers, Mary, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Clanchy, Michael, From Memory to Written Record, England 1066-1307, 2d ed.

(Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). Lewis, Suzanne, 1987, The Art of Matthew Paris in the "Chronica Majora"

(Berkeley: University of California Press).

, 1995, Reading Images: Narrative Discourses and Reception in the Thirteenth-

Century Illuminated Apocalypse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Michelent, H., and G. Raynaud, Itintraires d Jfrusalem, ridigis en francais aux

Xihme, XItme et XIIme sicles, Soci~t6 de L'Orient Latin, Sirie G6ographique, vol. 3 (Geneva:Jules-Guillaume Fick, 1882).

Skeat, T. C., "An Early Mediaeval 'Book of Fate': The Sortes XII Patriarcha- rum," Medieval and Renaissance Studies 3 (1954): 41-54.

Thomson, Rodney, M., Manuscripts from St. Albans Abbey 1066-1235 (Suffolk:

Boydell and Brewer, 1982). Thorndike, Lynn, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, vol. 2, During the

First Thirteen Centuries of OurEra (NewYork: Macmillan, 1923). Vaughan, Richard, Matthew Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1958).

Notes

I wish to thank the Traveling Committee and the Lippman Foundation of the

University of Chicago for their support while I conducted the research for my dissertation. The librarians and staffs at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and the British Library were extremely helpful and generous in granting access to manuscripts of Matthew Paris. I wish also to thank Linda Seidel for her careful attention to my project and to earlier drafts of this material, as well as the anonymous readers for Art Bulletin, who made many useful suggestions. Michael Clanchy's kind interest in my project and his generous suggestions on

Matthew Paris and Hugh of St. Victor were especially helpful and appreciated. Finally, I thank Anne Harris for her help with Old French throughout this project, but claim responsibility for any errors that remain. Unless otherwise noted, all transcriptions and translations are my own.

1. This article is a revised version of chapter 2 of my dissertation, Daniel K.

Connolly, "Imagined Pilgrimage in Gothic Art: Maps, Manuscripts and

Labyrinths," Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1998.




2. For the beginnings of an inquiry into medieval maps as manipulations of time and space, see Evelyn Edson, Mapping Time and Space: How Medieval

Mapmakers Viewed Their World (London: British Library, 1997). 3. From the time of the first Crusade, and even more so after the loss of

Jerusalem in 1187, control of the Holy City was often considered tantamount to gaining access to heaven. See the work of Bianca Kfihnel, From the Earthly to the Heavenly Jerusalem: Representations of the Holy City in Christian Art of the First Millennium (Freiburg: Herder, 1987); Hans E. Mayer, The Crusades, 2d ed., trans. J. Gillingham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Paul Alphan- d6ry, La chritienti et l'idie de croisade (Paris: A. Michael, 1954); and Adriaan Bredero, "Jerusalem in the West," in Christendom and Christianity in the Middle

Ages: The Relations between Religion, Church and Society, trans. R. Bruinsma (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1994), 79-104.

4.Jonathan Sumption develops many an example in support of the

popularity of surrogate pilgrimage practices in Pilgrimage: An Image of Medieval

Religion (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1975), 295-302. Imagined pilgrimage is one other form of substitute or alternative pilgrimage, whose

facility, like surrogate pilgrimage, was sustained by the economy of indul-

gences, the increasingly rich and metaphoric explanations of pilgrimage, and the desire to access the Holy City, especially after its loss to the Christians in 1187.

5. Suzanne Lewis makes a similar argument regarding the peregrinations that stemmed from the silent readings of 13th-century English Apocalypses; see Lewis, 1995, 33-34, 37-39. I wish to thank the anonymous readers for Art Bulletin for drawing my attention to Lewis's study of the performative values of these medieval texts and images.

6. Quoted in Jean LeClercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A

Study of Monastic Culture, trans. Catharine Misrahi, 3d ed. (reprint, New York: Fordham University Press, 1996), 62-65. Unfortunately, LeClercq does not

give the manuscript tradition for this meditation. The passage is a rather long one and, of necessity, I edit out much of its discussion of various themes in

praise of the Holy City--the imitation of the Israelites leaving Egypt, the

symbolism of the Trinity, the nature of the persons of the Trinity, the Sabbath, and so on. For the rich tradition of multisensorial cues in the similar meditations of the English Cistercian Aelred of Rievaulx (d. 1167), see Amnd6e Hallier, The Monastic Theology of Aelred of Rievaulx: An Experiential Theology, trans. Columban Heaney (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1969).

7.Jean LeClercq, "Monachisme et p6r6grination du IXe au XIIe si&cle," Studia Monastica 3 (1961): 33-52. See also the important and, in the end, corroborative studies of the same issues by Giles Constable, "Opposition to

Pilgrimage in the Middle Ages," Studia Gratiana 19 (1976): 125-46, and "Monachisme et pilerinage au Moyen Age," Revue Historique 258 (1977): 3-29.

8. Paul Mayvaert, "The Medieval Monastic Claustrum," Gesta 12 (1973): 53-60. For more on the medieval cloister, see this special issue of Gesta. For medieval uses of the term, see F. Cabrol and H. LeClercq, eds., Dictionnaire d'archiologie chritienne et de liturgie (Paris: Letouzey, 1914), s.v. "cloitre." For earlier monastic claustral practices involving peregrinatio in stabilitate, see Wayne Dynes, "The Medieval Cloister as Portico of Solomon," Gesta 12 (1973): 61-69; and Linda Seidel, "Installation as Inspiration: The Passion Cycle from La Daurade," Gesta 25 (1986): 83-92.

9. The quote is from the letters of Bernard, in Constable (as in n. 7), 137; see also LeClercq (as in n. 6), 54-57. In the 13th century, the "idea ofJerusalem" served as a sign of contemplation and became an especially potent and interiorized one; see Thomas Renna, "The Idea of Jerusalem: Monastic to Scholastic," in From Cloister to Classroom: Monastic and Scholastic Approaches to Truth (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1986), 106.

10. Two studies of the 19th century briefly posit that the maps functioned as a pilgrimage guide, without elaborating further: Frederic Madden, Catalogue of the Manuscript Maps, Charts, and Plans, and of the Topographical Drawings in the British Museum (London: British Museum, Department of Manuscripts, 1861), 14; and Michelent and Raynaud, xxiii.

11. Throughout this study, I refer to the cloistered life of medieval monks in reference to the Benedictine vow of stability; I do not mean to suggest that Benedictine monks were never allowed to travel, only to underscore how exceptional was monastic pilgrimage.

12. Matthew Paris's production of chronicles in Latin and Saints' Lives in Old French exemplifies the multiple languages used and understood by monks in post-Norman Conquest England. Michael Clanchy (197-233) addresses the complex and changing patterns of language skills in 13th- century England. After the Norman Conquest, Latin began to replace English as the official language of record, and during the 13th century, Old French, the spoken language of the Plantagenet court, began to flourish as a literary language, even to the point of replacing Latin as the most common written language. Yet English remained the most common spoken language. An educated person of 13th-century England could be expected to read and speak all three in varying degrees. Matthew Paris would often sign his name "Parisiensis" or "de Parisius," indicating that he was from that city; cf. Vaughan, 1, and Lewis, 1987, 3, who both argue for an English nationality.

13. Kiihnel's exhaustive study (as in n. 3) supplies many an example of this traditional iconography. The most convincing association between Matthew's depiction and the Heavenly City comes from the Apocalypse itself (Rev. 21: 10-16): "And in the Spirit he carried me away to a great high mountain, and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God ....

The city lies foursquare, its length the same as its breadth; and he measured the city with his rod, twelve thousand stadia; its length and breadth and height are equal." Suzanne Lewis (1995, 270 and n. 225) also understands Matthew's

geographic depiction to invoke these eschatological meanings. This turn from the earthlyJerusalem to the Heavenly Jerusalem gives a visual concreteness to the words of Bernard (as in n. 9), "to seek out not the earthly but the Heavenly Jerusalem, and this is not by proceeding with [their] feet but by progressing with [their] feelings." At the same time, Matthew's rendering closes the

temporal gap between the historic city and its future instantiation as the

Heavenly City; Matthew believed the world would come to an end in 1250, at about the same time that he made these maps. His depiction of a Heavenly Jerusalem at the end of these maps is infused then with those eschatological expectations and transforms the reception of the map into a temporal as well as spatial performance.

14. Matthew Paris, CCCC ms 26, fol. 4r: "civitatum dignissima omnium, tum

quia in ipsa morti addictus est Dominus, tum quia in medio mundi est, tum

quia prima habitacio fuit." Cf. Michelent and Raynaud, 132. I wish to express my thanks to Daniel Sheerin for his kind assistance with this passage and claim all errors as my own.

15. Lewis, 1987, 321-64. See also Vaughan, 235-50. These are the only two scholars to have treated the cartographic materials of Matthew Paris in any depth. For a broader treatment of the materials of medieval cartography, with additional bibliography, see David Woodward, "Medieval Mappaemundi," in The History of Cartography, vol. 1, Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval

Europe and the Mediterranean, ed. J. B. Harley and D. Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 286-370; and P.D.A. Harvey, "Local and

Regional Cartography in Medieval Europe," in ibid., 464-501. 16. There exist four different versions of this itinerary. The briefest is a

sketch version now part of his Liber additamentorum; it is probably his earliest (British Library [Brit. Lib.] ms Cotton Nero D i, fols. 183v, 184r, Fig. 10). The other three versions preface the three manuscripts that contain Matthew's Chronica majora. The second version is partially destroyed and was unfinished; it prefaces his second volume of the Chronica majora (CCCC ms 16). The remaining two versions are more or less complete. The itinerary map that

accompanies the first volume of his Chronica majora (CCCC ms 26) is the most complex and was produced about 1250. The fourth version prefaces the

manuscript containing his Historia Anglorum and the last volume of the Chronica majora (Brit. Lib. ms Royal 14 C vii). Its more sumptuous presentation, with gold leaf added to the borders, and more simplified layout suggest an audience different from the monks of St. Albans. For more details concerning the materials of Matthew's Chronica majora, as well as a compen- dium of his maps, see the extremely useful appendices by Lewis, 1987, 441-72.

17. Some might want to compare the maps to the Peutinger Map, a scroll map that is about one foot wide and stretched some twenty-two feet before being disassembled for preservation. This copy of an ancient Roman map dates to the late 12th or early 13th century, perhaps executed at Regensburg. While its longer-than-wider proportions recall Matthew's itinerary, its concep- tion of geography is wholly different from that of the itinerary; rather than presenting a specific itinerary excised out of the larger spread of world space, the Peutinger Map attempts to show all of the Roman Empire in the narrowly confined format of a rotalus (roll manuscript). On the Peutinger Map, and for additional bibliography, see O.A.W. Dilke, "Itineraries and Geographical Maps in the Early and Late Roman Empires," in Harley and Woodward (as in n. 15), 238-42; and idem, Greek and Roman Maps (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 112-20.

18. Lewis, 1987, 326-32. The designation of these maps as strip maps detracts, I believe, from their role in the codex.

19. Lewis does not elaborate on the possible circumstances that might have called for the addition of the flaps.

20. Again, there are four different versions of the itinerary. Matthew's earliest, the brief sketch version, shows him working through the problems of representing the itinerary as a continuous experience in its codex (Fig. 10). In CCCC ms 16, the second version, though partially destroyed and unfinished, there exist the stitching marks of once appended flaps. These previous versions suggest a genesis of the itinerary design and its flaps within the codex format.

21. Lewis, 1987, 348. While the design and layout of this opening arrest the itinerary's insistent movements, a road nonetheless continues from Acre along the coast toJaffa (Japhes) and up the page toJerusalem (Figs. 6, 7).

22. Lewis, 1987, 326. 23. Lewis, 1987, 374-76; Vaughan, 248; and Hans-Eberhard Hilpert, Kaiser-

und Papstbriefe in den Chronica majora des Matthaeus Paris (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1981), 90-96. He thought that the crusade of Richard of Cornwall, brother of King Henry III and with whom Matthew had several exchanges, was the most likely source for the maps, especially since Brit. Lib. ms Royal 14 C vii makes note of the papal offer of Apulia to Richard. Yet, as Simon Lloyd notes, trying to re-create Richard's itinerary is probably impossible; Lloyd, English Society and the Crusade, 1216-1307 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 157.

24. Lewis, 1987, 321-76; In the Latin edition of Matthew's chronicle, Chronica majora, 7 vols., ed. H. R. Luard, Roll Series (London: Longman's, 1872-83), Luard provided an extensive index to the Chronica in vol. 7, which would allow for a matching of "sources" with the cities depicted in the map.

25. Indeed, the route, as Paris described it, corresponds to the more or less standard routes followed in the centuries after the Norman Conquest. These,




of course, repeat popular, preexistent routes from Rome to England, for

example, the 9th-century itinerary of Sigeric. For a discussion of Paris's routes and how they compare with other itineraries, see George B. Parks, The English Traveler to Italy, vol. 1, The Middle Ages (to 1525) (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford

University Press, 1954), 179-93; see 45-97, for a discussion of earlier

Anglo-Saxon itineraries. 26. Other possible sources would have included eyewitness accounts,

written itineraries, other maps, and, perhaps, for parts of England and northern Europe, Paris's own travels. As far as we know, Matthew left England only once, to help reform a Benedictine house in Norway. His self-evident

pride in reporting this mission and his travels suggests he would have recorded more trips had he made them. See Vaughan, 4-7.

27. Matthew's Saints' Lives, for example, seem to have been read by the lay nobility. According to a note he wrote in a flyleaf to his Life of Saint Alban, these Old French translations circulated among the countesses of Arundel, Corn- wall, and Winchester; see Vaughan, 170. For a list of noble or important visitors to St. Albans, see Vaughan, 12-13. Vaughan counts ten visits by the king to St. Albans, recorded by Matthew Paris between 1223 and 1258.

28. Matthew writes that the king asked him to record the events of the feast of Saint Edward in 1247 and boasts of having been invited to dine with the

king; Vaughan, 3. 29. Henry III, for example, had made a vow to go on crusade but never

went. One could imagine his performance of these maps as a partial, perhaps only personal, fulfillment of that vow. Perhaps also the more finished and

simplified version of Brit. Lib. ms Royal 14 C vii was produced for his perusal. Those pages preface the Historia Anglorum, itself likely edited for his reading; for that editing, see Vaughan, 73; and F. Madden in his introduction to the Historia Anglorum, 3 vols., Roll Series (London: Longman's, 1866-69), vol. 3, xxxii.

30. Lewis (1995, 222) notes that Roger Niger advised planners of the Third Crusade to make a spiritual journey to the Heavenly Jerusalem as well as an armed pilgrimage to the earthly Jerusalem. For a reading of 13th-century illustrated Apocalypses as a "spiritual crusade beyond time," see Lewis, 1995, 221-24. I wish to thank the anonymous reader of Art Bulletin who reminded me that these materials might have served a multitude of meanings and uses.

31. See, generally, M.-D. Chenu, "Theology and the New Awareness of

History," in Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on New

Theological Perspectives in the Latin West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 162-201. Hugh of St. Victor's "theology" of history imposed on the chaos of the world's events a meaningful order by which those events could be understood. For an analysis of different forms of medieval history writing in search of "narrativity" and the meaning it provides, see Hayden White, "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality," in On Narrative, ed.

W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 1-23. 32. Hugh of St. Victor, quoted in Chenu (as in n. 31), 169. That the maps

perform their various historical contents as a means of recuperating the Divine Plan and ultimately accessing the Apocalyptic Jerusalem at their end is

one major theme of the larger study of my dissertation; see Connolly (as in n. 1), chap. 4, "The Performance of History," 177-221.

33. The peasant revolt of 1381 and the later dissolution of the abbeys under Henry VIII were particularly destructive of the archives of St. Albans. Except for the histories of Matthew Paris, most of its records unfortunately perished. For historical accounts of the abbey, see Eileen Roberts, The Hill of the Martyr: An Architectural History of St. Albans Abbey (Dunstable: Book Caste, 1993), 153-63. See also the collection of essays edited by Robert Runcie, Cathedral and City: St. Albans Ancient and Modern (London: Martyn, 1977).

34. The myth of Woden, the old Germanic god also known as Oden, recalls the Scandinavian origins of early Anglo-Saxons. See Francis Ingledew, "The Book of Troy and the Genealogical Construction of History: The Case of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae," Speculum 69 (1994): 685 and n. 98.

35. A volvelle is a disk of vellum attached to the folio by a pin at its center; it could thus be spun around freely.

36. Mappaemundiseem to be a common apparatus prefacing world chronicles. See Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken, "Mappa mundi und Chronographia," Deutsches Archivfiir Erforschung des Mittelalters 24 (1968): 118-86.

37. As Meyer Schapiro states, "the face turned outwards is credited with intentness, a latent or potential glance directed to the observer.... It seems to exist both for us and for itself in a space virtually continuous with our own, and is therefore appropriate to the figure as symbol or as carrier of a message"; Schapiro, Words and Pictures: On the Literal and Symbolic in the Illustration of a Text (Paris: Mouton, 1973), 38-39.

38. My understanding of projection into these maps draws its conceptual vocabulary from Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962); Maurice Merleau- Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (1962; reprint, London: Routledge, 1992); and Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. MariaJolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964). I do not mean to suggest, however, that the maps approach anything like an illusionistic depiction of three-dimensional space. Rather, through these various bodily, sensorial cues, the map would have encouraged the monk to project himself into their already internalized spaces. For a discussion of medieval theories of just such a physical and internal vision, called intromission, see Michael Camille, Gothic Art: Glorious Visions (New York: Abrams, 1996), 21-25.

39. Matthew Paris, Estoire de Seint Aedward le Rei, ed. H. R. Luard, in Lives of Edward the Confessor (London: Longman, 1858), lines 3960-65. On Matthew's authorship of this text, see Vaughan, 173-76.

40. I use the term passage to describe these pages in allusion to another term, passagium, borrowed from economic history and used by historians of the Crusades to indicate the increasingly casual and popular movements of the late 13th century between the Latin West and the Holy Land. Passagium became a seasonal traffic, departing at Easter and in the autumn. See H. Mayer (as in n. 3), 229.

41. On the tensions of the frame and its sustaining role in the field-image dynamic, see Meyer Schapiro, "On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in Image-Signs," Semiotica 1 (1969): 223-42; and Louis Marin, "The Frame of the Painting or the Semiotic Functions of Boundaries in the Representative Process," in A Semiotic Landscape, Proceedings of the First

Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies-Milan, 1974 (New York: Mouton, 1979), 777-82.

42. By horizon, I mean the edge of the book as understood from the

perspective of the viewer. As Yi-Fu Tuan remarks, "Every person is at the center of his world, and circumambient space is differentiated in accordance with the schema of his body"; Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 41. One's horizon is defined relative to one's place, and in these passages, I posit the

centrality of the viewer in his movements up the page. The page's top edge then becomes the horizon of that leg of the journey. In addition, the top edge is the horizon for the codex as an object of circumspective concern to the viewer. On the import of horizons for the body in perception, see Merleau-

Ponty's discussion (as in n. 38), 68, 102. 43. For a discussion of the sites Matthew chose to depict and their possible

political implications, see Lewis, 1987, 332-35. 44. As Eileen Roberts notes (as in n. 33), 4, the shape of Hertfordshire's

landscape, as part of the rim of the Thames River basin, ensures that the

region and its rivers, as well as St. Albans, flow south and east toward London. In her words, "Geography dictates that Hertfordshire in general and St. Albans in particular will look towards London. .. .

45. Lewis, 1987, 332. 46. St. Paul's Cathedral may have been given such prominent display not

only for the status it had achieved but also because of its recently acquired relic of the True Cross, displayed at the top of its very tall tower; Paul Binski, Westminster Abbey and the Plantagenets: Kingship and the Representation of Power 1200-1400 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 122-23. The text refers to London as the chief city of England, founded by Brutus, who called it the New Troy.

47. On medieval practices of reading aloud, see, among others, Clanchy, esp. 267-71; Michael Camille, "Seeing and Reading: Some Visual Implications of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy," Art History 8 (1985): 26-49; and Ruth

Crosby, "Oral Delivery in the Middle Ages," Speculum 11 (1936): 88-110. 48. Matthew once delivered a letter from King Louis IX to King Haakon in

Bergen. He must have gone to Norway by way of Paris. For a brief discussion, see Vaughan, 6-7. Matthew Paris marked the city of Paris (fol. lv, Fig. 2) as a place he knew when he added the possessive ending of his own name: Parisi's. Matthew would sign his name in his own works as "Parisiensis" or, less often, "de Parisius," and the abbreviation of his name above the city suggests that he had spent time in Paris, if he did not actually come from there. Vaughan (1), following 19th-century scholars, argued for a diminished significance of his name, believing it was a common enough patronymic in 13th-century England. Clanchy (215) sees in Matthew's use of signa a distinctly Victorine attitude, which, in combination with his name, led him to conclude that he was a product of the Paris schools.

49. For different ways to understand maps and how they can convey different sorts of information, see R. Glanville, "Mapping Realities," Architec- tural Association Quarterly 12 (1980): 20-31. Maps of subway routes are a prime example in which an itinerary distorts the shape of a city's spaces to better convey the sequence of geographic events.

50. In fact, Fleury appears twice in this passage (as "Fluri" at lower right), marking its importance for the audience.

51. On the accuracy of the different routes, see Friedrich Ludwig, Untersu- chungen iiber die Reise- und Marschgeschwindigkeit im XII und XIII Jahrhundert (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn, 1897), 122-29. The alternate directs the traveler along an unelaborated route closer to Germany.

52. Donald R. Howard makes a similar argument concerning pilgrimage guides in Writers and Pilgrims: Medieval Pilgrimage Narratives and Their Posterity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 12.

53. Matthew Paris, CCCC ms 26, fol. lv: "un chemin a senestre de vers orient ki puis repoire en lautre ki est plus a destre mais cest chemin est plus pres de alemainne." The second ancillary route reads, "Jurnee e demie ches chatrois De vers orient par autre chemin" (A day and a half by way of Chartres, toward the east by the other route).

54. Practical analogies exist in the instructions and conduct of liturgical performances (also centered on Jerusalem), which provide another context by which to explore how the monks of St. Albans would have learned to use-and to think about their use of-these materials.

55. The text next to the hospital reads, "le munt senis kem passe ki va en lumbardi."




56. Brit. Lib. ms Cotton Nero D i is composed mainly of three separate tracts, all by Matthew Paris, and was compiled as a book sometime in the mid- to late 1250s: the Vitae offarum, the Gesta abbatum, and the Liber additamentorum. For a discussion of the manuscript and its different contents, see Vaughan, 78-91. The part of the Liber additamentorum holding this map is made mostly of

single sheets of vellum added to the codex; the codex itself was later

rearranged. It therefore does not provide a context by which to date this version. This map has so far been reproduced only as a drawing by Konrad Miller, Mappaemundi: Die altesten Weltkarten, 7 vols. (Stuttgart: Jos. Rothsche, 1895), vol. 3, 68-94, esp. fig. 28; and again in Parks (as in n. 25), 185. It has yet to receive any study. A list of its towns, without elaboration, was made by Francis Palgrave, TheEnglish Commonwealth, vol. 2 (London: n.p., 1896), xix.

57. On this point, I mention also the profuse number of bridges, or "pons," that Matthew has drawn in as markers of boundaries of cities and as points of

overcoming, literally, a nature antagonistic to travelers. 58. For a discussion of the "kinaesthetic address" of Roman floor mosaics,

see John R. Clarke, Roman Black-and-White Figural Mosaics (New York: College Art Association, 1979), 19-39.

59. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), esp. 72-95. 60. Quoted in J. Kenneth Hyde, "Italian Pilgrim Literature in the Late

Middle Ages," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 72 (1990): 13-33.

61.Jonathan Z. Smith, "Father Place," in To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 28.

62. Roger Bacon, Opus majus, ed. John Henry Bridges (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1897), vol. 1, 138: "Sed locus est principium generationis, quemadmo- dem et pater."

63. See also the fine discussion by Aron Gurevich, "Macrocosm and Microcosm," in Categories of Medieval Culture, trans. G. L. Campbell (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 41-92.

64. Bourdieu (as in n. 59), 217 n. 40. 65. Matthew Paris, Abbreviatio chronicorum, Brit. Lib. ms Cotton Claudius D

vi, fol. 5v. 66. Lewis (1987, 170) notes this change in their order. 67. Schapiro (as in n. 37), 138-39. 68. Volvelles show up most often in later 14th-century texts on medicine,

helping the physician to determine the best prognosis based on the alignment of planets and therefore which zodiac ruled over a given part of the body. See, for example, H. Bober, "The Zodiacal Miniature of the Tres Riches Heures, "

Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 11 (1948): 24-26; and Rossell H. Robins, "Medical Manuscripts in Middle English," Speculum 45 (1970): 396-97.

69. Laurel Braswell-Means, "The Vulnerability of Volvelles in Manuscript Codices," Manuscripta 35 (1991): 43.

70. Michael Evans, "The Geometry of the Mind," Architecture Association

Quarterly 12 (1980): 32-55, esp. 42. Scholars who treat the volvelle's use in the

computus, again in the later 14th century, include Sten G. Lindberg, "Mobiles in Books: Volvelles, Inserts, Pyramids, Divinations, and Children's Games," trans. W. S. Michell, The Private Library, 3d ser., 2 (1979): 49-82; and Braswell-Means (as in n. 69), 43-54.

71. I have found no references to volvelles in manuscripts before those of Matthew Paris. Most scholars mistakenly date the first volvelles to the late 13th and early 14th centuries.

72. For a discussion of a later 14th-century wall map by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (now lost) and the organization of its contents for presentation in a similarly dynamic, revolving format, see Marcia Kupfer, "The Lost Wheel Map of Ambrogio Lorenzetti," Art Bulletin 78 (1996): 286-310, esp. 293-97.

73. Braswell-Means (as in n. 69), 43. 74. Faith Wallis, "Images of Order in the Medieval Computus," Acta 15

(1988): 45-68. 75. The Book of Fate is in Oxford's Bodleian Library, ms Ashmole 304. See

entries in Black, 213-16; Nigel Morgan, Early Gothic Manuscripts: 1190-1250, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), no. 89. Another manuscript for which Matthew made similar sketches of cityscapes is the Diagramaticon philosophiae by William of Conches (CCCC ms 385, 89-212). See the entry by M. R. James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912), ms 385, 232-33.

76. Based on handwriting, Vaughan (230) dated the manuscript to the previous decade, but Lewis (1987, 387-89) and Morgan (as in n. 75), 140, no. 89, both see the style of its illustrations as contemporary with the works of this period, from 1250 to 1255.

77. On Books of Fate, see Thorndike, 99-123; Skeat passim; C. H. Haskins, Studies in the History ofMediaeval Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1924), 135-37; and Louis Brandon, "Les prognostications au MS. Ashmole 304 de la Bodleienne," in A Miscellany of Studies in Romance Languages and Literatures Presented to Leon E.

Kastne, ed. Mary H. Willims et al.

(Cambridge: W. Heffer, 1932), 52-67. 78. Skeat, 47. No doubt some of the monks would have followed the

condemnations and avoided these books, others might have played them as games, in ways not so serious as I describe, but many would have taken them seriously, and we should remember that Matthew Paris devoted no small effort to their illustration. This condemnation probably also added to the mystical underpinning that sustained belief in their operations.

79. For a provocative discussion of the "inverted" author portraits of Socrates and Plato that preface the tract Prenostica Socratis Basilei, see the study by Michael Camille, "The Dissenting Image: A Postcard from Matthew Paris," in Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages, ed. Rita Copeland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 115-50.

80. Skeat, 44-46; and Thorndike, 113ff. 81. One assumes the audience to be the St. Albans monks, but because few

of the questions (human character, marriage, health, imprisonment, prosper- ity, fertility of soil, business,journeys) were truly applicable to the monastic, we see here the peculiar allure of classical authority and the exotic in clerical cultures.

82. By "inferior things," this prologue refers explicitly to the tradition of

astronomy on which Roger Bacon expounded. The "inferior things" are the orb of the Earth and its inhabitants, who receive the forces of the macrocosm as inverted pyramids reverberating through the spheres. The Book of Fate tries to interpret the effects and meanings of those forces. For the translation of this prologue and its manuscript tradition, see Thorndike, 110, citing Bodleian Library Ashmole 345, a late 14th-century manuscript with a

prologue identical to the one recorded beneath the image shown here. See Black, 213.

83. Thorndike, 112, calls it a dioptra, a device used by ancient surveyors to measure angles and inclinations of topography. There is no indication that such is depicted here or would be relevant. Rather, it appears to be a simple tube that would help to isolate targets of vision.

84. Black, 213. 85. Woodward (as in n. 15), 300. 86. This other zonal map is in his copy of William of Conches's Diagramati-

con philosophiae (as in n. 75), 178. 87. Olaf Pedersen, "Astronomy," in Science in the Middle Ages, ed. David C.

Lindberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 309-12. 88. While these figures precede a prologue that introduces geomantic tables

and accompanying astrological tracts attributed to Bernard of Silvestris, they are the first large illustrations in the book and their authority, both in person and in presence, extends to the greater part of the book itself.

89. The volvelle no longer survives, but a later, mid-14th-century manuscript (Oxford, Digby ms 46) that copies everything else in Ashmole 304 has a volvelle. In that manuscript, the volvelle is set into the thick cover of the codex and is made with two interlocking wooden cogwheels, which, like the tables themselves, transfer or displace the site of initial inquiry to some other place. See Thorndike, 116 n. 1; Skeat, 49; and Black, 215.

90. The inscription occurs on fol. 31v and is transcribed by Black, 215. 91. In the case of the city ofJerusalem, the monk was directed to the king of

India, that is, farther to the east, toward Paradise; this geography east of

Jerusalem has parallels, for example, in John Mandeville, Mandeville's Travels (New York: Kraus Reprint, 1974).

92. Skeat, 47. 93. The order of these coastal cities, as in other parts of the map, does not

coincide with how a traveler would encounter them. They read: "Lientee, Trane, Barlette, Bar-Seint Nicholas, Brandiz, Ortrente-port de mer," fol. 3r. For the attribution of Lecce for Leintee, see Lewis, 1987, 347, though she gives no reason.

94. These boundaries had elsewhere been marked as devices of artifice, self-originating and unstable. In the upper left of folio 2 verso, Matthew depicts the town of Milan (Melane) in different, even competing views. Divided into thirds, the city is seen from a side view and from two irreconcilable front views. The bands of color that comprise the frames here act in their own right as individual frames of this side view, thereby underscoring the general role of frames to obfuscate space. The instability thus lent to the frames marks them as spaces that invite transgression.

95. Bari, Brindisi, and Otranto appear to have been popular departure points for English pilgrims and Crusaders, especially after the Fourth Crusade. From the scant records of English medieval travel, of which Matthew Paris's itinerary is a significant contributor, Parks (as in n. 25) gives many an example: in 1102, Saewulf traveled to Jerusalem, sailing from Brindisi to Corinth and the Aegean before eventually reaching the Holy Land (144). Villehardouin, chronicler of the Fourth Crusade, mentions a Henry Longchamp who refused to sail in Venetian ships. Instead, he traveled to Rome and then Apulia to wait for the "March Passage"-the spring pilgrim ships from Bari or nearby ports (151). In 1293 Geoffrey de Langele, a royal envoy returning from Persia, landed at Otranto, crossed to Rome, and then traveled up the coast (191). Nikulus of Munkathvera, an Icelander, provides an itinerary that ends at Bari (192). An Anglo-Norman-Breton army embarked for the Holy Land on the First Crusade from Brindisi (199).

96. The flap is in its original shape; ruling marks can still be seen in the blank area below the quarter circle representing the Caspian Mountains.

97. Matthew Paris, CCCC ms 26, fol. 3r: "par devers la mer de venise & devers costantinople e sur ceste costere sunt cestes viles ki sunt ci esestres. La premere est ortrente ki est en chef de poille & apres trouve la premere bone vile kem trouve en poille devers la marche de ancoine." Cf. the transcription and translation by Lewis, 1987, 347.

98. In the same manner does the voice of liturgical directions come from a book, as shapes signifying voices of the absent, and carries as well the vague sense of authority that derives from the momentum of "the way we have always done it"; Bourdieu (as in n. 59), 159-71.




99. Like the cities of the Book of Fate, these are famous, distant, exotic cities with which the monk now has contact and which are brought within the

purview of his trip, put on his horizon, you might say. As well, the designation of the first good city forcefully reminds one of the linkage between cities as so

many sites of civitas punctuating the movement through the wilderness. 100. The full text (Matthew Paris, CCCC ms 26, fol. 3r) reads: "Co est le

chemin de acre en poille a ariver a chef de poille. Co est a saver a ortrente ki est de vers la mer de venise la plus proceinne vile de acre ki seit en poille." Cf. the transcription and translation by Lewis, 1987, 325.

101. Giles Constable's two articles(as in n. 7) are rife with examples of medieval thinkers advising their young charges to substitute the Heavenly for the earthly Jerusalem, and he shows that such substitution was especially prevalent in the monastery.

102. On folio 4 verso of the Brit. Lib. ms Royal 14 C vii version of the map, Matthew wrote: "Ci mainent les nefs lignees ke li rois Alisandre enclot Gog e

Magot. De ci vindrent celes gentz kem apele Tatarins ...

." (Here remain the

ships, lined up, with which King Alexander enclosed Gog and Magog. From here came those people called Tatars... .). For transcriptions and a translation, see Michelent and Raynaud, 125-26; and Lewis, 1987, 349. For a discussion of Matthew's designation of Gog and Magog as Tatars, see Lewis, 1987, 287-90; and references in the Latin version of the Chronica majora (as in n. 24), vol. 5, 191, and vol. 4, 306-7.

103. Matthew Paris, CCCC ms 26, fol. 3v: "L'enclos des muntz d[e] Caspie. Ci meinne [n] t les guns ke Deus enclost par la priere 1 roi Alisandre, ki isterunt devant le iur de iuise e frunt grant occise de tutes maneres de gents. Il sunt enclos es muntaines hautz & grant, ne poent issir" (The enclosure of the

Caspian Mountains. This holds the Jews whom God enclosed at the request of

King Alexander [and] who will issue forth before the Day of Judgment and

openly massacre all manner of people. They are enclosed by high and great mountains and cannot leave). See also Michelent and Raynaud, 125; and Lewis, 1987, 349. On the confusion and ambivalence of Gog and Magog with

theJews, see Scott D. Westrem, "Against Gog and Magog," in Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages, ed. Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 54-75.

104. We should recall here that Matthew held firmly to the belief that the world was going to end in 1250. On Dec. 16 of that year, on Saint Lucia's day, Matthew Paris brought the Chronica majora to a premature close with a list of portents and other events interpreted in light of the Apocalypse, followed by these verse lines: "Matthew, here your toils are over / stop your pen and labor no more / Seek not what the future brings / another age has other things." See the translation in Matthew Paris'English History, trans.J.A. Giles (London: Bohn, 1853), vol. 2, 411.

105. Matthew Paris, CCCC ms 26, fol. 3v. Cf. Michelent and Raynaud, 125. 106. Matthew Paris, CCCC ms 26, fol. 3v: "Etna: Cest le munt ki tuz iur sart,

et dist hon ke iluce est une gule de enfer kar le feu put. Si envent sufre....." (Etna: This is the mountain which [is] always barren and they say that this is a mouth of Hell since the fire stinks. As it blows out sulfur....). I wish to thank Nicole Lassahn for her assistance with this passage; any errors are of course my own. For a discussion of Sicily as a medieval site of entry into hell, seeJacques LeGoff, The Birth ofPurgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 201-8.

107. The Mouth of Hell is not necessarily an apocalyptic motif, but because so many scenes of the LastJudgment in medieval art depict the Hell Mouth and because the theme of the Apocalypse had already been developed in the Nation of Gog and Magog, then its display here would doubtless have evoked those associations.

108. Throughout her study, Mary Carruthers stresses that the medieval

system of memory, while standardized in some measure, was a personal one. The student needed to use backgrounds and images of his own making for them to carry the necessary resonant force that would ensure the system's efficacy; Carruthers, 61-79.

109. Carruthers, 232 n. 35; and Thomson, 107-8, entry nos. 49, 50, Oxford Bodl. Laud Misc. 370 and Laud Misc. 409.

110. Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Blackwell, 1952), 83-112.

111. For a discussion of Hugh's use of imagery, see Patrice Sicard, Dia- grammes midiivaux et exigise visuelle "Le Libellus de Formatione Arche" de Hughes de Saint-Victor (Paris: Turnhout, 1993), esp. 160-68, and 190-92.

112. Carruthers, 237. See also Smalley (as in n. 110), 95ff. Marcia Kupfer argues that Hugh had two mappaemundi to accompany his text, though no copy of these survive in any of the fifty-three manuscripts of his treatise; Kupfer, "Medieval World Maps: Embedded Images, Interpretive Frames," Word and Image 10, no. 3 (1994): 262-88. I agree with Carruthers that Hugh used the term mappaemundi in a metaphorical way, that his mappa, a term that could have multiple meanings in the medieval Latin, was more likely a cognitive scheme of plotting out events in places and then building interpretative interrelations. See also O.A.W. Dilke's review of La "Descriptio mappe mundi" de Hugues de Saint-Victor by Patrick G. Dalche, Isis 82 (1991): 121-23.

113. Elsewhere, Mary Carruthers has analyzed the architectural metaphors used by Hugh to describe his system of contemplation and learning: "The real

power of the mnemonic structure is not as a device for repetition (rote), but as a collecting and recollecting mechanism with which to construct one's own education

... ."; Carruthers, "The Poet as Master Builder: Composition and

Locational Memory in the Middle Ages," New Literary History 24 (1993): 888. On the reading and writing practices that generated multiple interpreta-

tions and meanings, see Karl F. Morrison, "The Exercise of Thoughtful Minds: The Apocalypse in Some German Historical Writings," in The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, ed. Richard Emmerson and Bernard McGinn (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), 253. Morrision discusses how medieval authors presupposed this kind of interpretative game, in which multiple meanings were made available beyond those intended by the author, who, nonetheless, intended that game. That is, they set up the field to allow and

encourage these possibilities, even if not all were specifically envisioned. The

play of the game demanded an exercise of visual as well as verbal imagination. When the subject was historical writings, history became a spectacle; the text, a

script with inexplicit stage direction; the reading, a performance before the mind's eye, but one that happened between and across these different

possibilities. See also idem, History as Visual Art in the 12th Century Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

114. The Gesta abbatum was first printed in 1640 under the editorship of William Wats along with the other hagiographic tracts by Paris contained in that manuscript: the Vitae duorum Offarum sive Offanorum .. ., ed. W. Wats (London, 1640). For the Roll Series, H. T. Riley printed the version by its

14th-century continuator, Thomas Walsingham, which for the years covered

by Matthew Paris is essentially the same as Wats's version: Gesta abbatum monasterii Sanctii Albani, 3 vols., ed. H. T. Riley, Roll Series (London: Longman's, 1867-69). For that part copied from Matthew Paris, see vol. 1. The account ofJohn's abbacy (1195-1214) is on 232, where it is related that he was able to recite the entire Psalter by heart both forward and backward.

115. Matthew Paris and Walsingham (as in n. 114), vol. 1, 192. 116. In fact, a 12th-century manuscript produced in the St. Albans scripto-

rium is prefaced with a full-page illumination depicting Hugh of St. Victor teaching three monastic pupils; Thomson, 64-65. The letters are also printed in Migne, Pat. lat., vol. 196, cols. 1227-30. The St. Albans manuscript is now at Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Misc. 409, fol. 3v. For a reproduction, see Christopher de Hamel, A History of lluminated Manuscripts (London: Phaidon, 1994), 111, fig. 94.

117. Lewis, 1987, 44-45; Clanchy, 175-77. See also Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England c. 550 to c. 1307 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974), 363-65.

118. Ralf de Diceto, quoted in Clanchy, 175. 119. Ibid., 175. 120. Ibid., 75. 121. Gransden (as in n. 117), 359. 122. Lewis, 1987, 44. See also Thomson, 100, entry no. 38. On the

handwriting, see Vaughan, 24, 129, 186. 123. Carruthers, 229-42. 124. Matthew Paris, CCCC ms 26, fol. 3r. Written immediately above La

Martre is the text, "Ci est lentree de poille devers la marche de Ancona" (This is the entry to Apulia toward the March of Ancona).

125. Ibid.: "A cest enseigne 4 Amunt u la nef est peinte a tel signe est le chemin de acre en poille. Co est a saver geska ortrente ki est devers la mer de venise la plus proceinne vile a acre ken poille soit. Al autre chemin sur mer a ariver landroit a la maisun le patriarche a acre sunt isles. Le premere meschine e lesse hon sicille a senestre e meaute a destre ki est la costere de barbarie

apres trove hon crete. E apres co cipre a senestre." Cf. the translation of Lewis, 1987, 325.

126. For the full text, see n. 100 above. 127. Projection into these depictions is made forcefully evident not only in

the previously discussed image of the path of water exiting the city of Ortranto but also in the itinerary of Brit. Lib. ms Royal 14 C vii, where different regions are marked more emphatically as points of entry.

128. Matthew Paris, CCCC ms 26, fol. 3r. Next to Salerno: "Ceste coste est la coste de calabre et est sur la mer vers orient."

129. Ibid., the text below the sign 0: "Al autre chimin sur mer a ariver landroit a la meisun le patriarche de acre sunt hilles. La premere est de meschenes e lesse hon secille a senestre. E mauste a destre. ki est la costere de barbarie. apres trove hon crete. E apres cipre."

130. Ibid.: "le far de meschines." 131. For a rich discussion of the interpretative possibilities of such stylistic

shifts, see Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), esp. "The Arrest of Peter Valvomeres," 50-76, and "Adam and Eve," 143-73; see also his "Figura," in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1959), 11-76.



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Imagined Pilgrimage in the Itinerary Maps of Matthew Paris

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