Take an Apple: Grasping the World in Manuscripts of L’Image du monde

Abstract

Imagine you could walk all the way around the Earth. Such an act of imagination involves visualizing the world as being round in the first place, a thought that might be counterintuitive to our experience of moving across flat surfaces. But medieval Europeans knew – just as we do today – that the world was round (Giacomotto-Charra and Nony), and that it was therefore conceivable (if not actually achievable) that a human being could travel all the way around its surface and end up where they started. The size and capability of an individual human body is not equal to the scale of global circumnavigation, and yet medieval authors, scribes, and artists juxtaposed images and texts in order to picture this extraordinary notion: to do so, they scaled the world down to the size of a circle inked onto a manuscript page to create heuristic diagrams. Early vernacular examples of these diagrams are found in the illustrative programme and references to it in the thirteenth-century French verse encyclopaedia, L’Image du monde, by Gossuin (or Gautier) de Metz.