Book Review: Monsters and Maps

 Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps

Chet Van Duzer (2013: British Library, 144pp.)

This is a beautiful book, to say the very least.  Van Duzer shows us how sea creatures, real, intended-to-be-real, and wholly imaginary, decorated maps from the earliest surviving Western examples, as much as 1,200 years old. The practice may be much older.

Van Duzer’s focus is on the sixth through tenth centuries. Maps were decorated with creatures real and fantastic to show believed dangers in specific areas, to emphasize the breadth and wonder of Creation, or just as decoration, especially on maps commissioned by the wealthy as art.  The creatures are sometimes absurd, sometimes intriguing, and sometimes even believable (a swordfish and a whale on the Gough map of Britain, c. 1400, are very accurate). An illustrated copy of Ptolemy’s Geography, made about 1560, was the pinnacle of sea monster art, including in its maps 476 creatures. Often creatures shown on maps turn up in other places, such as illuminated manuscripts, bestiaries, and church decorations.

Monsters on maps declined in the more scientific era that followed the Renaissance, but the older maps left us some gorgeous art as well as a window to the thinking of their times. Do any possibly indicate cryptozoological creatures, the modern sea serpents that never quite vanish into myth? They might: there is something in here to match up with almost any hypothesis (I don’t know what one artist used as a guide for a half-fish half-rooster, a literal chicken of the sea.) 

This is a great reference to the real and imagined monsters of the period as well as a thing of sometimes-breathtaking beauty. The 299 endnotes add many interesting details.