Isolated Islands in Medieval Nature, Culture and Mind

Paradise Islands in the East and West--Tradition and Meaning in Some Cartographical Places on the Medieval Rim of the World

PARADISE ISLANDS IN THE EAST AND WEST – TRADITION AND MEANING IN SOME CARTOGRAPHICAL PLACES ON THE MEDIEVAL RIM OF THE WORLD Felicitas Schmieder Paradise was, in Christian medieval thinking, a special and meaningful place, both in time and in space: It had been there since the very beginning of history when God created it as a home for the first human beings – and would still be there at history ’s very end. Revelations 2:7 alludes to its role at the end of all times, promising He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God. Considering this, paradise had to exist through all time, thus also in present – somewhere on earth, but unreachably. The Franciscan, John of Marignola, who travelled to East Asia and also to Indian islands (present-day Indonesia) in the mid-fourteenth century , tells that he could only hear the waters of paradise island rush in the distance. It was not a wide step to imagine a place secluded from the rest of the world not on the margins of the inhabited earth, surrounded by high mountains, but as an island, or, as John of Marignola puts it: Est autem paradisus locus in terra circumvallatus mari oceano in parte orientali (Paradise is a place on earth, surrounded by the ocean in the East).1 Consequently, this imagining happened frequently. We can trace it on late medieval world maps.2 These mappae mundi picture paradise quite regularly, named or at least easily recognizable, with clear features such as the four rivers of paradise (which John of Marignola heard), the tree (sometimes with the snake), and Adam and Eve, not always but often on an island or at least a peninsula at the very rim of the earth. On the more historically oriented maps (those dealing with human actions) one can find not only 1 Johannes de Marignola, Relatio (= excerpts concerning his voyage to Asia from his Cronicon Boemorum), in Sinica Franciscana I: Itinera et Relationes Fratrum Minorum saeculi XIII et XIV, ed. Anastasius van den Wyngaert (Quaracchi: Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1929), 531. 2 For the representation of paradise on medieval maps in a broader context cf. Alessandro Scafi, Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth (London: British Library, 2006). FELICITAS SCHMIEDER 4 Adam and Eve as signatures for paradise, but a depiction of them being driven out of paradise by the Archangel Michael (fig. 1-4).3 Fig. 1: Paradise on an island at the Eastern end of the world with the Four Rivers on an oval world map (29,5 x 20,5 cm), late 12th c., from Ms. Cambridge Corpus Christi Cod. LXVI, p.2 (known as the map by Henry of Mainz; nowadays frequently called Sawley world map (from Hahn-Woernle, Ebstorfer Weltkarte, cf. n. 3, p. 31) 3 The examples in this article are taken from several mappae mundi created between 1200 and 1500: world map in Lambert of Saint-Omer, Liber Floridus, 12th c., http://diglib.hab.de/wdb.php?dir=mss/1-gud-lat; – world map from Ms. Cambridge Corpus Christi Cod. LXVI, p.2; – the Hereford Map, 13th c.: P. D. A. Harvey (ed.), Mappa Mundi. The Hereford Map (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996); cf. Scott D. Westrem (ed.), The Hereford Map (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001); – Atlas Catalan, 1375: Atlas Catalan von 1375, ed. and trans. Hans-Christian Freiesleben (Stuttgart: Brockhaus, 1977); – Velletri or Borgia World Map, 15th c.: Nils Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld (ed.), Periplus. An Essay on the Early History of Charts and Sailing Directions (Stockholm: Norstedt, 1897), plate XXXIX; – Andrea Bianco, Atlante nautico (including his World Map), 1436: ed.Piero Falchetta (Venice: Arsenale Ed., 1993); – Mappa mundi by Andreas Walsperger, 1448, see Biblioteca Palatina. Katalog zur Ausstellung vom 8. Juli - 2. November 1986, ed. Elmar Mittler et al. (Heidelberg: Edition Braus, 1986), 236; also in Guglielmo Cavallo (ed.), Cristoforo Colombo e l’apertura degli spazi. Mostra storico-cartografica, 2 vols. (Rome: Libreria dello stato, 1992), I, 75 – world map from the Biblioteca Estense, Modena, c. 1450: Il Mappamondo Catalano Estense (Die Katalanische Estense Weltkarte), ed. E. Milano and A. Battini (Zurich: Urs-Graf-Verlag, 1995); – Rudimentum noviciorum epitome sive systema historiae universalis auctore incerto confecta et in sex aetates divisa ab OC–1473, 2 vols. in quart, Lübeck, 1475, fol.74v/ 75r. In recent years, several...