Introduction

“OF PARADISE I C ANNOT speak properly, for I have not been there; and that I regret,” writes the pilgrim-narrator in The Book of John Mandeville. In medieval Christian thought, Paradise is both the lost Earthly Paradise of Eden and the Heavenly Jerusalem yet to come—a place on earth, in the world's uttermost East, and a region of the afterlife; the first, lost home of humankind, and the last home of righteous souls with God. Project Paradise is a digital project that brings into conversation two late medieval representations of the Earthly Paradise: the thirteenth-century Hereford mappa mundi (world map) and the fourteenth-century Book of John Mandeville. Both the mappa mundi and Mandeville place the Earthly Paradise in the uttermost East of the world. This project takes the Mandeville's references to Paradise and attempts to place them on the map. Initially, I thought the exhibit would trace the continuities between the mappa mundi and Mandeville, the ways Hereford and Mandeville both draw on biblical narrative and the encyclopaedic tradition to create a geography of the East. But what I could not map was more striking than what I could: many of the allusions to Paradise in Mandeville have no place on the Hereford map.

This digital exhibit reveals that geography in Mandeville is far more pervasively oriented towards Paradise than the Paradise-topped mappa mundi. The Hereford map draws a clear visual boundary around the Earthly Paradise. The Book of John Mandeville, on the other hand, makes the boundary porous. Its inaccessible Paradise infiltrates the entire geography of the East. In Hereford, Paradise is remote and enclosed; in Mandeville, Paradise is a constant yet emphatically incomplete presence throughout the imagined East, surfacing through physical relics and remains, customs and legends, and fragmentary reflections.

Projecting a digital archive of Mandeville's Paradise references onto the Hereford map thus accomplishes three goals. It displays the relationship between text and map in a single image, as printed editions of map and text would not allow. It attempts to reconstruct medieval spatial poetics, translating and mediating between map and narrative, between the intersecting categories of space, time, and story.