The maps in the manuscripts made by Matthew Paris, a thirteenth- century monk of St. Albans Abbey, have long attracted the attention of scholars in a variety of disciplines. Their itineraries from London to Apulia and maps of the Britain and the Holy Land offer extraordinary and unrivaled representations of medieval Europe and the Mediterranean. The maps exist in multiple copies, some contemporary to Matthew Paris and some later. Although they have been frequently published, there have been no book-length studies dedicated to the maps themselves. Suzanne Lewis's 1987 the Art of Matthew Paris in the Chronica Majora (Berkeley, University of California Press ) dealt extensively but not exclusively with the maps; Richard Vaughan treats the maps only briefly in Matthew Paris (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1958). The monk's maps have also been the focus of several recent scholarly articles. [1] Daniel K. Connolly's The Maps of Matthew Paris. Medieval Journeys Through Space, Time, and Liturgy rejects the format of a more conventional monograph and instead examines the maps of Matthew Paris in the context of the visual culture of St. Albans, seeking to expose some of the visual contexts--spatial, liturgical, and graphic--that enriched the production of the maps. While some of his arguments are more persuasive than others, he has approached the work of Matthew Paris in an original and stimulating way and has made a meaningful contribution to our knowledge of the ways manuscripts, texts, images, rituals and prayers provided the fertile ground for the pictorial and cartographic imagination of Matthew Paris.
In his discussion of the maps and itineraries, Connolly relies heavily on the theoretical constructs of ritual and performance as well as on recent scholarship that posits reading as an active process rather than a passive one. Connolly argues that the imagined pilgrimage was enacted in the body of the reader/viewer, for whom the map was a "vehicle of imagined movements to Jerusalem" (62). Readers engaged with and sympathetic to this theoretical approach will likely find Connolly's analysis quite compelling. But readers unfamiliar with or unconvinced by his methodology may consider it cumbersome. All will agree, however, that Connolly's contribution to the scholarship on Matthew Paris has enriched the discourse concerning these important maps.
The first chapter of the book "Taken in the Spirit: Imagined Pilgrimage in Medieval Spirituality and Art" introduces the main elements of the book, including the fundamental premise that the maps (and indeed the entire oeuvre) of Matthew Paris must be considered in a spiritual context and particularly in relation to the visual culture of the abbey of St Albans. Drawing from his 1998 University of Chicago dissertation, "Imagined Pilgrimage in Gothic Art: Maps, Manuscripts and Labyrinths," and also a 1999 Art Bulletin article that addresses some of the same material, [2] Connolly argues that the itineraries and maps of Matthew Paris are best understood within the medieval practice of imagined pilgrimage, with particular emphasis on its role and exercise in a monastic context and for a monastic audience. The connection of the maps to practices of imagined pilgrimage is inventive and powerful and adds a rich dimension to our understanding of these images. Connolly also considers how the itineraries and the chronicle to which they were attached were an integrated spiritual project reflecting contemporary thinking about the course and shape of history and about the impending end of the world.
Chapter Two, "Journeys through Space: the Codex as Conveyance" is the longest chapter in the book and the most reliant on the specialized language characteristic of performance theory. In this chapter, Connolly details the bodily engagement with the codex, and in particular on the implied movement through space described by the itineraries and the manipulation of the added flaps on the maps. Drawing on current thinking about medieval visuality, the sensate experiences of reading, and the drama of the liturgy, Connolly recasts the experience of viewing the maps as a dynamic, physical process rather than a passive, sedentary one. He sees parallels between the linear transit of the imagined pilgrimage in the itineraries to the processions of the Easter liturgies he believes were celebrated at St. Albans, that "imported the sacred times and places of Christ's Passion into the ritual space of the abbey church" (72). In the last section of the chapter he considers the reader's physical contact with the codex, deeming it "a machine, a working tool that engages the viewer's whole body" (76). Connolly draws on a wide range of sources and comparanda to sustain this complex interpretation of the relation of the reader/viewer to the maps themselves.
In the third chapter, "Journeys through Time: the Format of History," Connolly considers the unusual linear format of the itineraries, "unique in medieval cartographic production"(93): at least they are the only such examples to survive. Although critical of earlier efforts to link the Matthew Paris maps to the history narrated in the Chronica majora, he notes that medieval authors used a variety of words to describe maps, including both mappamundiand estorie, among others (91).[3] He believes such images were thus understood as having historical content, even if only implicitly. The itineraries are "visual displays of geography as forms of history- telling (and as performances of history)" (93). This link between history and geography is further explored in his comparison of the itineraries to other types of manuscripts with similar graphic structures, notably English royal genealogies and Peter of Poitier's elaborately diagrammatic Compendium historiae. He argues effectively that the teleological format of the itineraries finds a parallel in these diagrams, which move through time and space in a comparable fashion. Such works were often produced in roll format and occasionally adapted to the form of the codex, which demanded the restructuring of their continuous forms into graphic frameworks that, though discontinuous, conformed to the confines of the page.
The following chapter "Journeys through Time: Geography as Prophecy," draws on the notion of temporal/spatial progression to consider the inscription of the translatio imperii implied by the path of the itinerary. Focusing on the cities of Jerusalem, Rome and London, the foundation myths for which are all described in the maps and itineraries, Connolly proposes that "moving through Paris' map becomes a reclamation of those past events, a recollection of critical events whose arrangement in a straight line helps to make sense of the Divine Plan and to prophesy its apocalyptic end" (118). The imagined journey implies therefore both a movement forward in time and also an historical regression: the monk holding the book saw himself progressing across space to move backward to Holy City at the time of Christ and simultaneously forward to it in pursuit of redemption. Noting that in all of the copies of the itinerary, the map of Jerusalem is on the seventh page, Connolly sees a parallel both to liturgical and meditative practice, in which the life of Christ was divided into seven parts, the last of which was the Passion, intended to coincide with Sunday.
Throughout the book, Connolly situates the itineraries and their Jerusalemic destination in the context of thirteenth-century unease about the imminent Apocalypse. He reads the premature end of the Chronica majora as an expression of Matthew Paris's pervasive Apocalyptic anxiety. In Chapter Six, Connolly explores how this conviction shaped the monk's representations of Jerusalem. As the culmination of the imagined journey, it collapses space and time to unite the viewer with a vision that again, looks forward and backward, back to the time of Christ and forward to the Heavenly City of the Apocalypse. Here Connolly again makes explicit connections with the performance of the Easter liturgy, when ritual drama and Easter sepulchers transposed the structures and events of the Passion of Christ of Jerusalem into English churches. Connolly draws connections between world maps and the body of Christ, such as can be seen in the now-destroyed Ebstorf Map and also in a mappamundi made by Matthew Paris. These intersections of space, time and faith, wrought in a variety of forms and media, testify to the rich traditions of embodied spiritual practice exemplified by the maps and itineraries.
In the last chapter, Connolly discusses the British Library's manuscript Royal 14 C VII, which is usually assigned to Matthew Paris. It includes not only the itinerary and a map of the Holy Land, but also a map of Britain. Arguing that its style and editing, as well as variations of spelling and its added gold leaf decoration all mark a significant departure from the other copies, Connolly rejects Vaughan's paleographic attribution of the manuscript to Matthew Paris. He believes instead that these are the work of a different, later scribe, and were produced for a royal patron, probably Edward I. Detaching the itineraries from the monastic context, Connolly sees this version as a more secular one, designed to appeal to the "acquisitive gaze" of the king, particularly in the context of his claim to the crown of Scotland (178). The itinerary is reinterpreted as a translation of empire, the maps of Sicily and Apulia as invitations to conquest, and the map of Britain as a territory unified, held and beheld by the king. After the exhaustive treatment of the itineraries in the earlier chapters, this brief chapter seems somewhat abbreviated.
Connolly's argumentation is far more elaborate and complex than I have been able to detail here in the summaries of these chapters. There are long excurses about the Veronica icon and the use of aumbries in English churches, and about the supposed shape of a chlamys. The book tries to reconstruct the way the itineraries and maps participate in the visual culture of St. Albans, and its emphasis on visual contexts emphasizes the way the maps were used and understood: the map as "mediator of experience" (58), rather than as a "site of exchangeof limited geographic knowledge" (58). In this equation the sites themselvesapart from London, Paris, Rome and Jerusalemdo not invite much consideration. But the minimal attention afforded the route creates some tension with the interpretative structure of the imagined pilgrimage: if the focus is on the destination, how do these (numerous, specific) intervening stages participate in the spiritual dimension of the journey?
Much of the evidence Connolly musters in the book depends on the inscriptions on the maps and itineraries, and his readings of these sometimes differ from those of earlier interpreters. As the notes make clear, his reading of the Latin and Anglo-Norman inscriptions on the itineraries and maps is often mediated by the translations and transcriptions of others. He relies heavily on Suzanne Lewis's published transcriptions of the inscriptions on the itinerary in Corpus Christi College Cambridge ms. 26. And there are a few ways that Connolly's interpretations aren't entirely supported by his readings. He argues, for example, that the itineraries are in Anglo- Norman, and that Latin is used only for the map of Jerusalem, a linguistic break that separated the Holy City both from the vulgar quotidian experience of the here and now (131). But there is plenty of Latin in the itinerary, primarily on the Italian peninsula (Spoletum, Roma, and others) and also on the map of Acre. Connolly asserts a clear distinction in style between stage and destination that is not wholly supported by the inscriptions. On the Corpus Christi itinerary, Paris is labeled in Latin (it is labeled in French in the so-called royal copy) as Parisi', the conventionalized Latin manuscript abbreviation for Parisius. Connolly argues for a reading of this suspension mark as Paris'is (for Parisiensis) and that it is an explicit effort on the part of the monk to draw attention to the place associated with him, albeit, it would seem, in a form both grammatically and paleographically idiosyncratic. (176). A richer discussion of the pictorial conventions of scribal practice would have added further nuance to Connolly's analysis.
The production of the book--editing, image quality, proofreading--is somewhat uneven. Petrus Comestor on one page becomes Petrus Comestar on the next; oikumene is used at least once before it is defined, twice. The photographs are mostly very good; a few are excellent, and one or two are unfortunately poor. There is a curious lack of consistency in the captions to the photographs; sometimes they identify sites in English, sometimes in Anglo-Norman. The pages that show London to Beauvais are rendered Beuveis on one image and Bouveis on another--this follows the spelling on the folios, but then surely London (in both cases) should be Lundres.
Historians of cartography have for many years invited us to consider maps as graphic expressions of networks of ideas (about place, power, etc); this book interprets the maps of Matthew Paris through the lens of another set of networks, primarily theoretical and interpretive (performativity, visuality, semiotics). Some readers will find this approach both provocative and engaging, and others may struggle to excavate its meaning from long dense sentences fraught with words like emplottment, intellected and placeness. For readers seeking a less theory-driven approach to the maps, Salvatore Sansone's, Tra cartografia politica e immaginario figurativo. Matthew Paris e l'Iter de Londinio in Terram Sanctam[4] focuses on rather different aspects of the maps and their maker. Connolly has opened new channels of investigation into the maps of Matthew Paris, and although his argument is not uniformly convincing, he has certainly made an important contribution to the study of these works. His book will surely invite much discussion among scholars and serve as a springboard for much future work.
NOTES:
[1] Michael Gaudio, "Matthew Paris and the Cartography of the Margins," Gesta 39 (2000): 50-7; Katherine Breen, "Returning Home from Jerusalem: Matthew Paris's First Map of Britain in its Manuscript Context," Representation 89 (2005): 59-93.
[2] 81/4 (1999): 598-622.
[3] I think the meaning of estorie or estoire here may have more layers than Connolly allows. It can certainly mean history, but it also means representation, or image. We preserve some sense of this when we describe an initial in a manuscript as historiated. This sense of estorie/estoire is more commonly used in the later Middle Ages, but Matthew Paris uses it himself in his Estoire de seint Aedward Le Rei, in which he refers to a church, the (presumably stained-glass) windows of which a estoires. See K. Y. Wallace, ANTS 41, London, 1983, line 2303. From http://www.anglo- norman.net/cgi-bin/form-s1, accessed 18 May 2010.
[4] Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, Nuovi Studi Storici, 84, Rome, 2009.