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Scott D. Westrem, The Hereford Map: A Transcription and Translation of the Legends with Commentary, Terrarum orbis 1 (Turnhout: Brepols Press, 2001). lix + 476 pp.; 26 plates. ISBN 2-503-51056-6. euro70.00.
Naomi Reed Kline, Maps of Medieval Thought: The Hereford Paradigm (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press; Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2001). xiv + 261 pp.; 1 plate, 93 figures. ISBN 0-85115-602-9. L40.00.
The mappamundi preserved in Hereford Cathedral is the only surviving large, complete, oikumenic circular map now known to us. As such it has for many years been, justly, the subject of commentary. It is unfortunate that the commentary has come largely from medieval historians, many of whose ideas, albeit eclectic, do not comprehend the one skill that is essential - the ability to interpret a map. It is possible that so much misunderstanding is the fault of cartographic historians; we have taken many things for granted that we ought to have explained.
There are two basic texts upon which interpretations of the Hereford Map have had to rely, those of Bevan and Phillott (1873; reprinted in 1969) and Konrad Miller (1896); neither is perfect but both are valiant efforts at placing before the reader solutions to the hundreds of questions that any serious student of the map must ask. Professor Scott Westrem's book both succeeds and supersedes these volumes, and renders much of the twentieth-century work on the Hereford Map more open to discrimination. With Westrem's book a new start can be made.
There are 1,091 inscriptions on the Hereford Map, ranging from single-word place names to the ten lines describing Babylon and to the passage from Solinus describing the rhinoceros. Westrem covers these in 495 pages. On a right-hand page he gives an edited version of the inscription, followed by the inscription as it appears on the...