Old and New Land in the North and West: The North Atlantic on the Medieval Globe around 1500

In six steps, this article questions both the state of Latin European knowledge of the world around 1500 and modern understandings (or wishful thinking) about this knowledge. Starting from the contemporary (medieval) awareness of not knowing, as well as contemporary belief in what we consider legendary, it surveys the growing information about the known world produced during the "age of discoveries," with a special emphasis on the islands in the Atlantic. It then proceeds to examine the geographical knowledge of Scandinavia available to Latin European map-makers, especially in the realm of Ptolemaic cartography, and considers the influence of this knowledge on the earliest world maps to include Scandinavia and the new lands identified, or hypothesized, between Europe and Asia. While the question of what we modern historians think we can know hovers in the background all the time, it comes very much into focus when we look at the so-called Vinland Map—not in order to reassess its authenticity, but to a fresh consideration of its horizons of possibility.