Transcription problem - f68v3 and Rosettes foldout

[Linda]

I think you will find they knew where they were better than you think. The Hereford mappa mundi is a map of the ecumene, not of earth, as is the Oresme. It would equate to the habitable section.

Oresme's inverted TO is supposed to show a two sphere system using one flat circle. It is not important though to figure that part out (since it was wrong anyway), it is the depiction of the habitable world that is important.

You have to imagine:

A) the circle is a sphere, we are looking at the front half, the back half is also there but of course cannot be seen from a vantage point of head-on to the front.

Why is this the front? It is like the current date line, but instead of Greenwich, it was set just west of Spain. Thus it would include all land on the east side of the Atlantic ocean. Also the equator meets it in the middle. This was thought to be an inhabitable zone, and terra or aqua incognita to the south of that.

B) the habitable part encompasses the whole right side, so there is a half we cannot see because it is the back side. So the upper right is not Europe, but Europe and Africa, and you can just see a bit of Asia, the rest (China, for instance) is around the back.

This can be seen in d'Ailly's go at depicting the world, circa 1410, it is sort of the sideways view of that same sphere. What is interesting here is that he was considered the last of the medieval geographers and the first of the new and he became popular at the Council of Constance. (I think Lake Constance is featured in quire 13 also). His writings were used as a guide by Columbus (who would have run out of provisions if he hadnt reached land where he did). Ptolemy was just being translated at the same time, d'Ailly then read it and wrote more. 

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But here is another way to look at it. This helped me visualize it properly.



This is from above of the earth looking down with Greenwich mean time as the front (bottom), or center line of the circle of Oresme (except there it is west of Spain so includes everything landwise and does not cut it off). Right hand side is Eurasiafrica, to the equator. They knew where they were because of how the stars turned, or the earth turns, as we know it to be now. So that was basically the ecumene. If you cut off at about 3 o'clock to cut off the back side you cannot see when looking at it from the front, you end up with India as the back end, just as i have stated the ecumene to appear to me to be expressed in quire 13. And the equater cuts off at the juncture of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. The left side is unknown to them in their time period but they suspected it was there, hence the wild greenery. So that wild area is North America. What you think is Africa is not, if it follows Oresme's scheme, which updates the TO map by placing it on a larger world and into its place in the Aristotlean scheme of the universe. Things are starting to come together.

But, through various errors they thought it was pretty close from Spain to India. The bottom half of the world was suspected by Oresme to be only water, for various reasons including gravity and religion. Oresme differed from others in that they thought there was 10 times as much water as earth, but he thought they were more or less equal. So we get water on the bottom half. It is not Asia, that is still on the northeast side, behind Europe and Africa at the front.

This is built upon other works as well, although the water on the bottom was often replaced with antipodes.




The ecumene has grown over time, Anaximander, Hecateaus, Erastosthenes are shown here.



So i see Oresmes' view to contain a similar ecumene to Hecateus, but superimposed on the spheres of the elements earth and water. Oresme thought the spheres of earth, water and air all turned together as one. After that, he basically followed Aristotle's view. Everything old is new again.