Liber Floridus Mappamundi

Liber Floridus Mappamundi

Liber Floridus World Map; Mappamundi of Lambert of St. Omer; Mappamundi of Wolfenbüttel Liber Floridus

Description of the Liber Floridus mappamundi: There are three existing manuscripts of the Liber Floridus: the original in Ghent that was made before 1125 (1120 is generally agreed upon) and likely written by Lambert himself, and the Wolfenbüttel and Paris copies. Only the Ghent copy does not contain a full mappamundi; the Wolfenbüttel and Paris copies both have a mappamundi but they differ slightly from each other. This Omeka entry (and description) is on the Wolfenbüttel mappamundi.

Very little is known about the author Lambert, except that he was a Benedictine monk in the early 12th century in what is now Norhter France, he was selected to be the Canon of St. Omer, and that he created the Liber Floridus.

The mappamundi is a 30cm x 43cm circle map, oriented with East on top and taking up almost a full spread of the Liber Floridus manuscript. It features four colors: turquoise/ocean green (water), white (land), light red (mountains and borders), and black (outlines and place labels). An encircling ocean surrounds the entire map in turquoise, which in turn is surrounded by a red line, suggesting an unpassable barrier. The map is divided into two sections by the equator (along the manuscript gutter), with a red line from top left to bottom right marking the sun’s ecliptic.

When looking at an open manuscript or book, the verso is the left page (or back of the previous page) and the recto is the right page (or front of the next page).

This mappamundi is considered a zone map, although the verso taken alone resembles a T-O map: the bottom half is bisected by the vertical Mediterranean which leads upwards to a horizontal body of water which is a combination of the Black, Aegean, and Red seas. Asia is the upper half of the verso, while Africa is the bottom right quadrant, and Europe is the bottom left.

The verso is full of small rivers and mountains, but some bodies of water like the Nile and the Tyrrhenian Sea are emphasized. The southern half of the map (on the recto) is dedicated to land below the equator, of which little is known. The encircling ocean is full of islands, but unusually the only island in the Mediterranean is one big circle: this island is presumably Sicily.

The labels of this map are particularly interesting. While some labels name places (e.g. Aquitania, Italia, Roma) many describe the people or things that inhabit those lands, like a label that reads ‘place of dragons and serpents and cruel beasts’ in southeastern Africa. Lambert also included the areas of Gog and Magog, Paradise, and the Antipodes, according to previous medieval tradition (the former two are in northeast Asia and east Asia respectively, while the latter is in the far west oceans).

There is text on both the verso and recto around the map, and there is also a large piece of writing within the unknown land of the southern hemisphere. There are very few symbols used in this map: there are no figures of humans, animals, or any living creature or plant. In fact, the map is reasonably minimalistic compared to other illustrative medieval maps; this mappamundi’s only decoration comes in its color and in the wavy lines of the ocean that offer subtle patterning.

(Peter Kenedi 2027)

Lambert of St. Omer

Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, Cod. Guelf. 1 Gud. Lat, 144-145. f.69v-70r

Map in manuscript

Lambert. Der “Liber floridus” in Wolfenbüttel : eine Prachthandschrift über Himmel und Erde. Edited by Patrizia Carmassi and Christian Heitzmann. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2014.

ca. 1120

Manuscript

Special Collections, Carleton College, Northfield, MN

Latin

World map

World

Vorholt, Hanna. Shaping Knowledge : The Transmission of the “Liber Floridus.” London: The Warburg Institute, 2017.

Woodward, David. “Medieval Mappaemundi.” Chapter 18. In History of Cartography 1, edited by David Woodward and J. B. Harley, 1:286–370. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Rights for maps held by individual publishers and institutions. Thumbnails displayed constitute fair use. Full image of map is usable in public domain: "Image digitizations of Herzog August Library holdings are published as public domain." (https://diglib.hab.de/nutzungshinweise.html).