Watch How European Borders Changed since the Middle Ages

This very cool video was found by @BeautifulMaps. It shows how the rise and fall of various states in Europe since the mid-twelfth century

The Pope Resigns, the British Library digitizing medieval manuscripts, and more Richard III

Beginning today, we will be changing how the Medieval News blog is presented. We hope to bring you a new post every day or two, which will cover what medieval and history news stories are out there, and some interesting things that were also found online. We hope you enjoy the links and videos!

Can the Pope Resign?

Pope Benedict XVI announced today that he will be resigning as the Pontiff effective February 28, 2013. Also known as Joseph Ratzinger, the 85-year old Pope has been suffering from poor health. Still, this is a very surprising announcement, with the last Pope to resign being Gregory XII in 1415. A few months ago, we posted about The Pope who Quit, by Jon M. Sweeney, which details the papal intrigues surrounding the resignation of Celestine V in 1294.

Lines of beauty: British Library’s medieval manuscripts go digital

The Financial Times has profiled the British Library's efforts at digitizing its 25,000 medieval manuscripts, and profiles six of these items. Claire Breay, head of medieval and earlier manuscripts at the British Library, explains “Anybody can enjoy them whether they are the leading academic on some aspect of that manuscript … or a schoolchild doing a project." Some beautiful images here.

How I mapped the “lost” forests of Huntingdonshire 

Jason Peters has been examining records related to royal forests in Huntingdonshire during the Middle Ages. Using local archives and geographic computer programs, he was able to locate various royal and private forests in the county. In fact, nearly all of the county was legally considered a forest.

Peters explains, “A Norman-Medieval forest was, in effect, a legally defined conservation area where no matter who was the landowner construction, resource exploitation, habitat degradation and hunting of game could not be undertaken without Crown approval. The Forest of County Huntingdon was an evolving, dynamic, socio-political phenomenon, not limited to woodland habitat but extending across pastures, Fenlands, arable, meadows and rivers.

“There is 800 years of history that hasn’t been understood. People could be living somewhere that was a forest. By mapping areas that we now know were woods, we can understand the ecology of the area, which could be very important when considering any future development.”

You can check out Jason Peters' website, Posthumous Plans: Mapping Lost Landscapes, which officially launches later this week.

Richard III: Exhibition draws in the crowds at Leicester's Guildhall 

 The City of Leicester is already showcasing the story of Richard III, and has a temporary exhibition about the discovery of the English King. Here is a video of how it looks:




Richard III Memes

Some pretty funny work being done with Richard III this week...

Top Tips for Visiting Medieval Cairo

Finally, I want to point you to a podcast I heard the other day: Elizabeth Eva Leach, Professor of Music at the University of Oxford, spoke as part of the Engage: Social Media Talks series, about Blogging and Tweeting. Professor Leach is a medievalist who has developed a very good website about her work, and also tweets from @eeleach. For those interested in using social media as part of their academic career, this is well worth a listen too!

From Ancient Deforestation, a Delta Is Born

Humans were tampering with nature long before the Industrial Revolution’s steam and internal combustion engines arrived on the scene. The invention of agriculture around 8,000 years ago, some argue, significantly changed ecosystems as it spread around the globe.

 Although scientists are only just beginning to understand how these ancient alterations shaped our world today, a new study in Scientific Reports suggests that millennium-old development along the Danube River in Eastern Europe significantly changed the Black Sea ecosystem and helped create the lush Danube Delta in Romania and Ukraine.

 “My team had a big surprise,” said Liviu Giosan, a geologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and the lead author of the study. “We found that around a thousand years ago, the entire basin changed dramatically, though that later made sense when we put it into context.”

Click here to read this article from the New York Times

See also: Early Anthropogenic Transformation of the Danube-Black Sea System

Elizabethan Map of America provides clue to ‘Lost Colony’

After decades of unsuccessful searching, archaeologists may have their best evidence ever of the possible fate of Sir Walter Raleigh’s “Lost Colony.” It comes in the form of a clue from Sir Walter himself, secreted within the 425 year old “Virginea Pars” map drawn by his expedition to site the first English colony in the New World.

At a conference held yesterday at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, archaeologists and scholars from the First Colony Foundation and the British Museum discussed the newly discovered information previously hidden within the map and possible implications for understanding the eventual fate of Raleigh’s “lost colonists.”

The “Virginea Pars” map was produced from explorations conducted by members of Sir Walter Raleigh’s Roanoke Colony of 1584-1590. The remarkably-accurate map depicts the coastal area from Chesapeake Bay to Cape Lookout, including the location of many native American villages visited by the colonists. However, until now the map provided little information about the location of his planned “Cittie of Ralegh.”

Click here to read this article from Early Modern England

Warning signs from ancient Greek tsunami

In the winter of 479 B.C., a tsunami was the savior of Potidaea, drowning hundreds of Persian invaders as they lay siege to the ancient Greek village. New geological evidence suggests that the region may still be vulnerable to tsunami events, according to Klaus Reicherter of Aachen University in Germany and his colleagues.

The Greek historian Herodotus described the strange retreat of the tide and massive waves at Potidaea, making his account the first description of a historical tsunami. Reicherter and colleagues have added to the story by sampling sediments on the Possidi peninsula in northern Greece where Potidaea (and its modern counterpart, Nea Potidea) is located. The sediment cores show signs of “high-energy” marine events like significant waves, and excavations in the suburbs of the nearby ancient city of Mende have uncovered a high-energy level dated to the 5th century B.C. The Mende layer contains much older marine seashells that were probably scoured from the ocean bed and deposited during a tsunami.

Click here to read this article from History of the Ancient World

Earliest medieval map of Britain put online

A fifteen-month research project of the earliest surviving geographically recognizable map of Great Britain, known as the Gough Map, provides some revealing insights into one of the most enigmatic cartographic pieces from the Bodleian collections. The findings are recorded on a newly-launched website.

The fifteen-month AHRC-funded project used an innovative approach that explores the map’s ‘linguistic geographies’, that is the writing used on the map by the scribes who created it, with the aim of offering a re-interpretation of the Gough Map’s origins, provenance, purpose and creation of which so little is known. Although the identity of the map-maker is unknown, it is now possible to reveal that the text on the Gough Map is the work of at least two scribes: the original 14th-century scribe and a 15th-century reviser.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Matthew Boyd Goldie awarded fellowship to study medieval geography

Dr. Matthew Boyd Goldie has been awarded a McColl Research Fellowship from the American Geographical Society Library at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. There, he will explore how the British Isles were considered in contrast to other landmasses in the 13th through 15th centuries, as well as the perceived effects of their insularity on their civilizations and cultures.

After traveling from his native New Zealand to Brooklyn College for a Master of Fine Arts, Dr. Matthew Boyd Goldie was already well acquainted with the geography of the earth – at least by modern standards.

Now that has been awarded a McColl Research Fellowship from the American Geographical Society Library at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Goldie intends to deepen his familiarity with the earth’s geography as it was understood by his scholarly ancestors from the Middle Ages. The library, which contains North America’s foremost geography and map collections – some 500,000 maps of all types covering the globe on a range of scales – will provide the ideal setting for the subject of Goldie’s latest research: How were the British Isles thought of in contrast to other landmasses in the 13th through 15th centuries? And what were the perceived effects of their insularity on their civilizations and cultures?

Click here to read this article from Rider University

Hereford Mappa Mundi gets £50,000

Hereford Cathedral’s internationally renowned Mappa Mundi and Chained Library exhibition is to get a ‘make-over’ following the award of a £50,000 grant by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) towards a new exhibition and the re-telling of their stories.

The Mappa Mundi is a a medieval map created around 1300, which depicts the known world in a T-O design. It is currently on display in Hereford Cathedral in Hereford, England.

Click here to read this article on Medievalists.net

The Northern World, AD 900-1400 - new book examines the arctic region in the Middle Ages

Idaho State University anthropology Research Professor Herbert Maschner has co-edited the book The Northern World, AD 900-1400, released in December 2009.

The Northern World, AD 900-1400 examines rapid and catastrophic climate changes and social networks in the region of the Arctic from the Bering Straits to Greenland from A.D. 900 through 1400. Maschner and his colleagues acknowledge scientists see the region of the Arctic as a critical modern laboratory for investigating the long-term impact of global warming. The cultures and lives of indigenous people during this time span are examined to understand historical and modern climate and social impacts.

The book details the medieval period as a time of dynamic and variable change in Arctic climates. It challenges preconceived notions that the people indigenous to the northern world were geographically and socially isolated. It explores two great human migrations that occurred in the period, between The Medieval Climate Anomaly (an unusually warm period) to the Little Ice Age, which saw remarkable human and species adaptation to climates. Archeological records reveal the adaptation of both human and species in the continuum of such harsh environments.

Further, the book discusses the indigenous peoples’ remarkable adaptation to climate and social systems of the time. It argues the period was highly active in warfare and hunting, the rise and fall of widespread cultures and the appearance of hemispheric trade networks.

Maschner’s co-editors include Owen K. Mason and Robert McGhee. Mason is editor of Alaska Journal of Anthropology and board member of the Alaska Anthropological Association. He is currently a research affiliate with the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado.

McGhee is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and of the Arctic Institute of North America. He has been awarded the Massey Medal by the Royal Canadian Museum of Civilization.

Rare 1602 World Map, the First Map in Chinese to Show the Americas, on Display at Library of Congress

A rare, 400-year-old map that displays China at the center of the world will be on exhibit at the Library of Congress from until April 10, before it heads to its intended home at the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota. The map is on loan from the James Ford Bell Trust.

The Matteo Ricci World Map, the first in Chinese to show the Americas, will be on exhibit for the first time in North America, joining the Library of Congress’ cartographic gem, the 1507 Waldseemüller World Map, in the ongoing exhibition "Exploring the Early Americas." The exhibit is free and open to the public from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday through Saturday, in the Northwest Pavilion on the second floor of the Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First St. S.E., Washington, D.C.

After the three-month display, the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division will digitally scan the 1602 document and make the electronic image available to scholars and students for research.

"When the James Ford Bell Trust asked the Library to be the site for unveiling the Ricci map in North America, I was delighted," said Deanna Marcum, associate librarian for Library Services. "The Ricci map, the first map in Chinese to show the Americas, will be placed near the Library’s Waldseemüller Map of 1507, the first document to name America and to depict a separate and full Western Hemisphere. These two maps will ‘talk’ to each other, offering a unique perspective on East-West linkages."

The 1602 map was drawn by Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), a missionary in China, and measures 5.5 feet tall by 12.5 feet wide. It was designed to be mounted on a folding screen.

The James Ford Bell Trust purchased the map for $1 million from the firm of Bernard J. Shapero, a noted dealer of rare books and maps in London, for the benefit of the James Ford Bell Library.

When the map returns to Minnesota, it will be displayed for a limited time at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Afterward it will move to its intended home in the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota.

Vinland Map is authentic, expert confirms

The 15th century Vinland Map, the first known map to show part of America before explorer Christopher Columbus landed on the continent, is almost certainly genuine, a Danish expert said Friday.

Controversy has swirled around the map since it came to light in the 1950s, many scholars suspecting it was a hoax meant to prove that Vikings were the first Europeans to land in North America -- a claim confirmed by a 1960 archaeological find.



Doubts about the map lingered even after the use of carbon dating as a way of establishing the age of an object.

"All the tests that we have done over the past five years -- on the materials and other aspects -- do not show any signs of forgery," Rene Larsen, rector of the School of Conservation under the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts.

He presented his team's findings at the 23rd International Conference on the History of Cartography in Copenhagen on Friday. His paper was entitled,'Facts and Myths about the Vinland Map and its Context'.

The map shows both Greenland and a western Atlantic island "Vinilanda Insula," the Vinland of the Icelandic sagas, now linked by scholars to Newfoundland where Norsemen under Leif Eriksson settled around AD 1000.

Larsen said his team carried out studies of the ink, writing, wormholes and parchment of the map, which is housed at Yale University in the United States.

He said wormholes, caused by wood beetles, were consistent with wormholes in the books with which the map was bound.

He said claims the ink was too recent because it contained a substance called anatase titanium dioxide could be rejected because medieval maps have been found with the same substance, which probably came from sand used to dry wet ink.

American scholars have carbon dated the map to about 1440, about 50 years before Columbus "discovered" the New World in 1492. Scholars believe it was produced for a 1440 church council at Basel, Switzerland.

The Vinland Map is not a "Viking map" and does not alter the historical understanding of who first sailed to North America. But if it is genuine, it shows that the New World was known not only to Norsemen but also to other Europeans at least half a century before Columbus's voyage.

It was bought from a Swiss dealer by an American after the British Museum turned it down in 1957. It was subsequently bought for Yale University by a wealthy Yale alumnus, Paul Mellon, and published with fanfare in 1965.

The lack of a provenance has caused much of the controversy. Where the map came from and how it came into the hands of the Swiss dealer after World War Two remain a mystery.

Mapping Medieval Geographies

The Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at UCLA is holding a conference this week on “Mapping Medieval Geographies: Cartography and Geographical Thought in the Latin West and Beyond, 300-1600.” This conference aims to promote an exchange between historians, philologists and geographers working on geographical ideas and thinking from late Antiquity to the Renaissance.

The conference was organized by Dr. Keith D. Lilley (Queen’s University Belfast) and the late Professor Denis Cosgrove (UCLA). Dr. Lilley said in an interview with Medievalists.net that "we had begun planning the conference in 2006 following discussion that such an event was needed to bring together a wide range of scholars working on different aspects of geography and cartography, broadly across the Middle Ages, and across Europe. Few geographers are doing this kind of work themselves, so (as two geographers) we both wanted to provide a forum for exchange to flag-up this work to a geographical audience, as well as highlight to those historians working on the topic the potential of linking to current ideas and trends in historical and cultural geography."



Nineteen papers will be given over a three day period starting on May 28th, which will be held at Royce Hall at UCLA. Some of the papers include “Chorography Reconsidered: Roman Mapping Traditions in Late Antiquity and Beyond,” by Jesse Simon, and “Portraits of ‘the West’ in Arab Maps and Poetry,” by Karen Pinto. Dr. Lilley will deliver the first paper, where he says he will discuss "what it means 'to map', and how this can help us in understanding not just maps as visual representations but also as textual ones. I also make the point that medieval geography was a topic discussed by geographers in the twentieth century, but geographers have lately neglected their discipline's medieval ancestry."

The conference organizers are negotiating with Cambridge University Press on the possibility of publishing the papers of this conference in a volume. Dr. Lilley is hopeful that this will be the beginning of renewed interest in medieval geography. "There is much potential," he explained, "especially in cross-disciplinary research, whether focused on a particular map, or text, or an individual person or group - I am setting up such a project to work further on the 14th-century Gough Map of Great Britain, but the potential exists to work on, say, the geographical texts in particular archives, as Natalia Lozovsky has done, or particular themes, such as cartographic representations of Europe from Islamic and Christian medieval traditions. I hope these new areas might develop as a result of the conference."

For details about the conference, including its program, please go to: http://www.cmrs.ucla.edu/programs/conference_mapmedgeos_program.html

Roman and Byzantine Empires and climate change

CAVE'S CLIMATE CLUES SHOW ANCIENT EMPIRES DECLINED DURING DRY SPELL
4 December 2008
States News Service

The decline of the Roman and Byzantine empires in the Eastern Mediterranean more than 1,400 years ago may have been driven by unfavorable climate changes. Based on chemical signatures in a piece of calcite from a cave near Jerusalem, a team of American and Israeli geologists pieced together a detailed record of the area's climate from roughly 200 B.C. to 1100 A.D. Their analysis, to be reported in an upcoming issue of the journal Quaternary Research, reveals increasingly dry weather from 100 A.D. to 700 A.D. that coincided with the fall of both Roman and Byzantine rule in the region.

The researchers, led by University of Wisconsin-Madison geology graduate student Ian Orland and professor John Valley, reconstructed the high-resolution climate record based on geochemical analysis of a stalagmite from Soreq Cave, located in the Stalactite Cave Nature Reserve near Jerusalem.

"It looks sort of like tree rings in cross-section. You have many concentric rings and you can analyze across these rings, but instead of looking at the ring widths, we're looking at the geochemical composition of each ring," says Orland.

Using oxygen isotope signatures and impurities - such as organic matter flushed into the cave by surface rain - trapped in the layered mineral deposits, Orland determined annual rainfall levels for the years the stalagmite was growing, from approximately 200 B.C. to 1100 A.D.

While cave formations have previously been used as climate indicators, past analyses have relied on relatively crude sampling tools, typically small dental drills, which required averaging across 10 or even 100 years at a time. The current analysis used an advanced ion microprobe in the Wisconsin Secondary-Ion Mass-Spectrometer (Wisc-SIMS) laboratory to sample spots just one-hundredth of a millimeter across. That represents about 100 times sharper detail than previous methods. With such fine resolution, the scientists were able to discriminate weather patterns from individual years and seasons.

Their detailed climate record shows that the Eastern Mediterranean became drier between 100 A.D. and 700 A.D., a time when Roman and Byzantine power in the region waned, including steep drops in precipitation around 100 A.D. and 400 A.D. "Whether this is what weakened the Byzantines or not isn't known, but it is an interesting correlation," Valley says. "These things were certainly going on at the time that those historic changes occurred."

The team is now applying the same techniques to older samples from the same cave. "One period of interest is the last glacial termination, around 19,000 years ago - the most recent period in Earth's history when the whole globe experienced a warming of 4 to 5 degrees Celsius," Orland says.

Formations from this period of rapid change may help them better understand how weather patterns respond to quickly warming temperatures. Soreq Cave - at least 185,000 years old and still active - also offers the hope of creating a high-resolution long-term climate change record to parallel those generated from Greenland and Antarctic ice cores.

"No one knows what happened on the continents... At the poles, the climate might have been quite different," says Valley. "This is a record of what was going on in a very different part of the world."

In addition to Valley and Orland, the paper was authored by Miryam Bar-Matthews and Avner Ayalon from the Geological Survey of Israel, Alan Matthews of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Noriko Kita of UW-Madison.