This volume is an attempt to illuminate the way geographic space was described and visualized in premodern times and how significantly these depictions differed from region to region, from period to period, and from context to context. Various methods of mapmaking and different ways of putting travel experiences into words yielded different results. The history of travel and mapmaking does not reveal a continuous evolutionary progression, but, rather, results in the delineation of individual distinctionsand differences ...

The present essay is an attempt to show how and why winds and geographic entities, originally referred to as the parts of the earth and only later as continents, became important for the perception of the structure of the world. My starting point is Burchard of Mount Zion’s travel report ‘Descriptio terrae sanctae’, written between 1274 and 1285, which was based on these two concepts. Versions of that report, which circulated from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, were adorned with various illustrations. I ...