The Interactive Hereford Map

The Mapping Mandeville project is an inspired idea to map medieval geographical knowledge on a medieval map of the world.  The project maps excerpts from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville onto an interactive version of the medieval Hereford Map'.

'The Travels of Sir John Mandeville' is a fourteenth century fantastical tale of the travels of a supposed English knight, called Sir John Madeville, throughout the knowm world. As a work of fiction the tales draw heavily from medieval ideas about geography and the world map as it was known at the time. The Mapping Mandeville Project therefore has plotted excerpts from the tales not on a modern map of the world but on the Hereford Mappa Mundi.

The Hereford Mappa Mundi is the largest medieval map in existence. The map dates from around 1300 and depicts the world as it was believed to exist at that time by most Europeans. Jerusalem sits at the center of this world, east is at the top and west is at the bottom.

The Mapping Madeville Map is an interactive version of the Hereford Map overlaid with information on cities, races, and geographic elements, as portrayed in The Travels of Sir John Madeville. If you click on the map markers or other interactive features on the map you can read how these locations are described by 'Sir John Mandeville' in his fantastical tales.

The Mapping Madeville Map therefore provides an amazing insight into medieval ideas about the world on top of an actual medieval map of the world.