Mapping Mandeville
*winner of the Medieval Academy of America’s 2019 Digital Humanities and Multimedia Studies Prize (here)
This project offers a website that overlays text from John Mandeville’s 14th century book, The Travels, onto a copy of the 13th century Hereford Map to help demonstrate consistencies in medieval geographic imaginaries. Primarily intended as a teaching tool, this project lets readers contextualize Mandeville’s textual world within a contemporary visual framework.
This project examines English eel-rents from the 10th through the 17th centuries to help show both the extent and longevity of eel-rents as a part of the medieval English economy. Included are maps of eel-rents by century, estimates of the distances that rents travelled, and an educated guess about of the worth of eels in modern terms.
How Medieval Texts Became Fantasy Maps
The text of a conference paper presented by John Wyatt Greenlee and Anna Waymack at the 2018 International Conference on Medievalism at Brock University. The paper looks connects J.R.R. Tolkien’s use of maps to the medieval tradition of prefacing works of history with textual, rather than graphical, descriptions of the world, and argues that Tolkien’s work connects the trope of maps at the start of modern fantasy literature to a specifically medieval past. This is part of a larger ongoing collaborative piece.