About
This website was created by students in the Medieval Worlds first-year seminar in the fall of 2020 at the University of Pennsylvania.
Course Description
We pride ourselves on thinking globally and having at our fingertips information about people, places, and times. How did people before c.1600 imagine the whole world, and how did they learn about it? In this course, we read a variety of premodern texts that try to take the whole world into account. We traced the geographical imaginations and cultural encounters of early writers across different genres, from maps, to Islamic, Jewish, and Christian travel narratives, such as the account of John de Mandeville (one of Christopher Columbus's favorite writers); to monstrous encyclopedias and books of beasts, such as the "Wonders of the East"; to universal chronicles and Alexander the Great romances. We also explored different medieval systems of thinking big, such as socio-political schemes, genealogies, bibliographies, and taxonomies of species.
Home Page Images
Images on the home page are drawn from items in these exhibits and from manuscripts of De proprietatibus rerum ("On the Properties of Things") by the thirteenth-century scholar Bartholomaeus Anglicus ("Bartholomew the Englishman").
The banner uses images from the following four items (clockwise from top left):
- Taymouth Hours, f. 75r (from Women in Medieval Falconry)
- Autumn Colors on the Qiao and Hua Mountains (from Treading the Yuan: Ruling a Conquered Land)
- Bone Plaque Saddle (from Medieval Armour from the Descriptions of Medieval Romances)
- Der Naturen Bloeme in KB Manuscript (from Bosch's Marvelous Medieval Influences)
Icons use images from the following manuscripts (top to bottom):
- Amiens, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 399, fol. 241r. Livre des propriétés des choses (transl. Jean Corbechon), Northern France, ca. 1447.
- Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Français 9140, fol. 157r. Livre des propriétés des choses (transl. Jean Corbechon), France, 15th century.
- Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Français 134, fol. 169r. Livre des propriétés des choses (transl. Jean Corbechon), Bruges, ca. 1470.
Credits
Exhibits curated by Hannah Bases, Vishwesh Desai, Kristine Enemuo, Isaac Gateno, Sophia Jesteen, Cagney Kelshaw, Benjamin Rutherford, Liam Seeley, and Samantha Stein.
Course developed and taught by Professor Emily Steiner.
Website design and assistance with exhibits by Aylin Malcolm.
This project received crucial support from staff at Penn Libraries and the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts: Nicky Agate, Emily Esten, Jennifer Garcon, Nicholas Herman, Mayelin Perez, and John Pollack.
We are grateful for the additional guidance provided by Christopher Atwood, Paul Cobb, Zoe Coyle, Reyhan Durmaz, Sarah Guerin, Larry Silver, Adam Smith, and Brian Vivier.