Reading the author’s preface to this scholarly thesis makes one appreciate how much time, trouble and detailed research has gone into the preparation of the volume. Dr Evelyn Edson is professor of history at Piedmont Virginia Community College in Charlottesville, Virginia, and she has been at work on the volume since at least 1990 and probably before that. With generous help from her college, and with research grants from a number of foundations and endowments, she has travelled to many countries, and has been welcomed in many libraries. She refers to “six delightful months” in Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and also records “an especially warm memory of the small city library of Albi, where the kindly librarian seated me at a table overlooking a garden with lemon trees and handed me their priceless eighth‐century manuscript”.
The bibliography of medieval cartography is already impressive, as a glance at the 12‐page list of titles in this volume demonstrates. Dr Edson’s book will be regarded as a notable addition to it. She is the first to acknowledge help and guidance given to her by such authorities as Catherine Delano Smith, P.D.A. Harvey and others prominent in the field. She assesses this freemasonry of scholarship by asserting that “surely a more open‐minded and welcoming collection of scholars never existed”.
Dr Edson’s volume is presented in eight chapters and a conclusion. Turning first to the latter, she points out that world maps took several forms, and that until the twelfth or thirteenth century there was no universal model. Then medieval mapmakers began to base their works more on geographical features, especially those with religious connections. Jerusalem, a provincial city of little importance in the heyday of the Roman Empire, gradually migrated to the centre of medieval maps after Christ’s execution and resurrection. Going back to her first chapter, Professor Edson looks at classificaton systems for early maps, and takes a close look at an Anglo‐Saxon map made in England around the year 1050. Being from the Cotton MS in the British Library, this is illustrated on page 8 and is shown to be a remarkable map of Europe and those parts of Africa and Asia known in the middle of the eleventh century. This is perhaps the place to remark that Dr Edson has taken every opportunity to support her thesis with illustrations, most in black‐and‐white, but those from the Hereford Cathedral map, as well as a few others, are in colour.
Her other chapters are written around such topics as Space and Time in the Computus Manuscript, Maps in Three Computus Manuscripts, Maps in Medieval Histories, and a fascinating one headed “Histories without Maps, Maps without Histories”. The contributions of pre‐medieval scholars such as Eusebius, Jerome and Flavius Josephus, as well as those of the medieval historians like Ranulf Higden and Matthew Paris, are examined in great detail. All in all, this is a splendid contribution to the history of cartography, one deserving of the most detailed study, and one which will surely stand the test of time.
A word should be added in praise of the publisher, the British Library. I was President of the Library Association 25 years ago, and in my Presidential address I described 1973 as the year of the British Library, expressing the hope that the new body would adopt high standards in the fields of publishing and public relations. It certainly has done so and, not for the first time, it is a pleasure to be able to praise the quality and appearance of a BL published book. Designer John Mitchell and printer Henry Ling of Dorchester should also be mentioned in despatches. The whole production is a delight to handle and possess.
