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Reviewed by:
  • Rome’s World: The Peutinger Map Reconsidered
  • Timothy D. Barnes
Rome’s World: The Peutinger Map Reconsidered R.J.A. Talbert In association with T. Elliott, assisted by N. Harris, G. Hubbard, D. O’Brien, and G. Shepherd, with a contribution by M. Steinmann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-521-76480-3, Pp. xviii + 357. 26 plates, 7 figures, 1 table, with additional resources at www.cambridge.org/9780521764803.

One of the greatest treasures in the Austrian National Library in Vienna (Codex Vindobonensis 324) is a set of eleven pieces of parchment each about thirteen inches high, which were formerly gummed to one another at the edges and which measure in total about 22 ft. in length from left to right. One or more pieces have clearly been lost at the left, but the whole formed a map of the Roman world from the British Isles and Spain to India. This parchment map, traditionally known as the Tabula Peutingeriana, after Konrad Peutinger, who owned it from 1508 until his death in 1547 and made its existence known to the scholarly world, used to be called “the Peutinger Table” by those who wrote about it in English. In 1987, however, in a brief and trenchant discussion, Oswald Dilke insisted that its traditional title was misleading and that it deserved to be treated as a real map (O.A.W. Dilke, “The Peutinger Map,” in J.B. Harley, D. Woodward, eds., History of Cartography 1: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean [Chicago/London, 1987], 238–42). Following Dilke’s lead, Richard Talbert has now put the Peutinger map fully in the context both of other ancient maps [End Page 375] and of the history of cartography, first in his essay “Cartography and Taste in Peutinger’s Roman Map” in the volume Space in the Roman World: Its Perception and Presentation, which he edited with Kai Brodersen (Antike Kultur und Geschichte 5 [Münster, 2004], 113–41) and now in the final chapter of his splendid new book, which has the title “The Map’s Place in Classical and Medieval Cartography” (162–72) and develops and amplifies observations propounded in the earlier essay.

Talbert’s book represents both an outstanding achievement and the most significant landmark in the publication and understanding of the map since its discovery at the start of the sixteenth century. Under Talbert’s inspiration and leadership a team of expert cartographers at the University of North Carolina, originally assembled for the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World (Princeton/Oxford, 2000), has produced a digital edition which for the first time makes the Peutinger map in all its detail fully accessible to all rather than to those who were able in the past to travel either to Vienna to inspect the map itself or to the small number of libraries that possessed expensive reproductions of it. (For some details of what needed to be done, see T. Elliott, “Constructing a Digital Edition for the Peutinger Map,” in R.J.A. Talbert, R.W. Unger, eds., Cartography in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Fresh Perspectives, New Methods, Technology and Change in History 10 [Leiden/Boston, 2008], 99–110.) In evaluating this achievement properly, however, an important distinction must be made. Talbert has coordinated and overseen an accurate and illuminating presentation of the surviving map, which all agree was produced ca. 1200, at some date between 1175 and 1225, and he subjects all aspects of it to a full and rigorous examination. On the other hand, his hypothesis about the date and function of the original Roman map from which the map in Vienna derives is open to serious challenge. The two very different enterprises must be assessed separately.

In a long introductory chapter, Talbert presents the evidence for the history of the manuscript itself since its discovery, surveys the checkered story of the publication of the map, and evaluates the scholarship devoted to it over five centuries (10–72). After a much briefer chapter on the physical characteristics of the manuscript, especially its palaeography, which is co-authored by Martin Steinmann (73–85), Talbert considers the design and character of...

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