La representación del mundo en la Edad Media: la cartografía

Abstract

This essay intends to make a short review of the main aspects of medieval cartography, especially of the maps of the world made during this period. Among the main characteristics to observe in these forms of representations of the world, one can find the lack of attention to distance and scale accuracy, as well as to the functional nature of cartography imposed by Cartesian thinking. To the contrary, medieval mappaemundi seem to efficiently exemplify the “map” definition given by Peter Jackson for whom this concept includes every graphic representation of knowledge. Finally, the reading here proposed about medieval world maps is made under the perspective of lefebvrian space theorizations, specially from the point of view proposed by the French philosopher about the role of representation in the process of the production of social space.