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.
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