The Beatus Maps: The Revelation of the World in the Middle Ages by Sandra Sáenz-López Pérez (review)

A revision of the author’s prize-winning 2007 Art History dissertation at the Complutense, this volume, published simultaneously in Spanish and English, is the first book-length study of this important medieval cartographical corpus.

The maps studied here illustrate the Commentary on the Apocalypse compiled by Beatus of Liébana between 776 and 784 CE. They appear in fourteen manuscripts dating from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, almost half of the twenty-six surviving illuminated codices and fragments of Beatus’s commentary.

The maps fall into two groups: small, schematic maps illustrating the tripartite division of the earth among the sons of Noah in the genealogical tables that introduce the commentary in some of the manuscripts, and the spectacular world maps that illustrate the apostolic evangelization of the earth (recounted in Book II, chapter three of the commentary) in impressive illuminations that span a full opening (verso and facing recto).

The Beatus mappaemundi form a world unto themselves in medieval cartography. First, unlike the well-known schematic maps (of which the T-in-O is perhaps the most familiar), the Beatus world maps add to the well-known tripartite structure (Europe, Africa, Asia) a quarta pars mundi inaccessible from the known world because of the sun’s heat. In addition, they are set apart by their unusual apocalyptic context, brilliant color palette and iconographical vocabulary, and, of course, their monumentality. Their size and vivid visual detail makes their contemplation a sort of virtual pilgrimage, and the growth of real-life pilgrimages is recorded in their evolution: the map in the Burgo de Osma Beatus of 1086, for example, introduces the Camino de Santiago in a red line across the Iberian peninsula to the Galician coast (193).

In seven chapters and two appendices, Sandra Sáenz-López Pérez offers an extraordinarily detailed and learned descriptive analysis of the entire corpus of Beatus maps and affiliated imagery. Deeply learned in both ancient natural history and modern scholarship on her subject, and possessed of an almost praeternatural familiarity with the maps themselves, the author guides us through the often very subtle variations from codex to codex as the maps are copied in new historical and cultural contexts.

After an initial pair of chapters introducing the Beatus commentary and its maps, she turns to a painstaking descriptive analysis of the characteristic elements of the Beatus mappamundi: physical geography (the shape of the world, land masses, ocean, seas, rivers, mountains, islands, deserts) in chapter three; the apostolic lands and the quarta pars mundi in chapter four; legendary elements in chapter five; and finally, the representation of regions, provinces, and cities in chapter six.

Each chapter breaks its categories down into their constitutive elements, describing each one (e.g., representations of the Nile or the city of Rome) in detail, and comparing its treatment across the corpus of manuscripts. This kind of minute analysis requires extraordinary patience to generate; it requires some patience to read, too, as the level of detail can be overwhelming. This is, thus, a book to be gratefully consulted more than read sequentially as a single sustained argument.

The concluding chapter seven offers a reconstruction of the (lost) original world map designed, the author believes, by Beatus himself, concluding that that map must have “owed a major debt to cartography of Roman origin”; “the maps of Saint-Sever, El Burgo de Osma and Milan”, she continues, “are the ones which have best preserved that debt” (275). Isidorean influences are prominent too, of course: she discusses the presence of schematic world maps in Iberian manuscripts of the Etymologies (55–57). The remainder of the chapter reviews significant points of transformation in the Beatus world maps’ evolution, linking them to changes in artistic style and prevailing ideology (the presence or absence of cities associated...