The Ebstorf Mappa Mundi

Hello all! Crazy weather we're having, eh?

I thought I'd share with you one of my favorite maps, The Ebstorf Mappa Mundi:

I first encountered this map during a Medieval art and architecture class I took last spring. Like the Hereford Mappa Mundi we heard about in the BBC documentary last week, the Ebstorf map is a medieval attempt at mapping what was then known of the world. Medieval cartography was very much influenced by religion, and like the Hereford map, the Ebstorf shows Jerusalem in the center. In the Middle Ages all this Christian iconography stuff was still pretty new and artists came up with clever yet often hilarious ways of showing the various paradoxes and metaphors of the religion. Here, in the Ebstorf map, the artist wished to show, basically, that Jesus is everything. The trees, the buildings, the rivers, etc? All Him. So to illustrate this point the artist put Jesus' head at the top of the map, His feet at the bottom, and one holy hand on either side, making the entire map - the entire world - his body. The idea is that He is in everything, and everything is in Him, and it's a pretty cool concept, but he just ends up looking like an enormous fat man, or like Violet Bauregarde from Willy Wonka:

Unfortunately we can't arrange a field trip to go see my (and I'm sure now your) favorite map because it was destroyed in World War II , but luckily color copies were made before it was bombed.

PS: Sarah posted some stuff about the Bayeaux Tapestry, which I also like very much but probably wouldn't have previously thought of as a map. A couple of years ago someone animated the second half of the tapestry. It's pretty rad so I've embedded it below.

Happy snowy-time everyone! See you Friday!(?)