Friday, April 03, 2015

The Medieval Digital Map


The Gough Map or Bodleian Map is the oldest surviving route map of Great Britain. The map probably dates back to the 14th or 15th centuries.

There is some debate over the age of the Gough Map and Linguistic Geographies has been attempting to answer the question of who made the map & when by examining the language and place-names used on the map. Their research of the map's language suggests that some of the map’s writing dates to around the 1370s. The research also found evidence that some of the place-names on the map have been overwritten at later dates.

You can examine the map and the map's language yourself in close detail on The Linguistic Geographies digital version of the map.


The Agas Map is a beautiful bird's eye view map of London, first printed in 1561. The map depicts a London which is still a walled city and where the banks of the Thames are dotted with bear pits and playhouses.

The Agas Map of Early Modern London is an interactive version of the map built using the OpenLayers platform. You can pan and zoom in on the map and you can explore locations on the map using the location categories menu. For example if you turn on the streets layer you can click on roads on the map to learn more about the road and its etymology.

The Map of Early London website includes a comprehensive encyclopedia of London people, places and topics featured in or important to the map. The interactive locations on the map connect with the encyclopedia. If you select a location from the map or from the locations menu you can read a snippet from the encyclopedia and click through to read the full encyclopedia entry.


Old Maps of Paris includes a number of interesting historical maps of the French capital. There are 25 historical maps in total in the collection, including a map of the small town of Paris circa 360 AD.

The oldest maps in the collection the 360 AD, 580 AD & 1180 AD maps of Paris were all actually created in the 18th century and were based on the historical records of the time.

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