The Holy Land Geography as Emotional Experience

In this paper,we evaluate various medieval cartographic and diagrammatic representations of the Holy Land. The analysis focuses particularly on the religious dimensions of these representations and their potential for making pilgrimage accessible, creating religious symbolism and exciting spiritual emotions. The leading hypothesis is that medieval mapmakers introduced special technical features into maps and similar cartographic representations to deepen religious emotions and to stimulate intense sensory responses in the readership of narrative travel accounts.The main focus of the paper is one of the most important late medieval travel accounts on Palestine, namely Burchard of Mount Sion’s ‘Descriptio Terrae Sanctae’. It begins with an outline of the tradition of maps and other diagrammatic representations connected with Burchard’s ‘Descriptio’. We then concentrate on one particular graphical projection, the double-paged Holy Land map in Florence (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 76.56, fols. 97v–98r). Finally, our paper contextualizes the Florence map in the late medieval reception of travel reports, exploring how cartographic visualizations could stimulate an emotional response intended to intensify the experience of pilgrimage.