The Medieval Peutinger Map Imperial Roman Revival in a German Empire

The Peutinger Map remains the sole medieval survivor of an imperial world-mapping tradition. It depicts most of the inhabited world as it was known to the ancients, from Britain's southern coastline to the farthest reaches of Alexander's conquests in India, showing rivers, lakes, islands, and mountains while also naming regions and the peoples who once claimed the landscape. Onto this panorama, the mapmaker has plotted the ancient Roman road network, with hundreds of images along the route and distances marked from point to point. This book challenges the artifact's self-presentation as a Roman map by examining its medieval contexts of crusade, imperial ambitions, and competition between the German-Roman Empire and the papacy.

1. Introduction; 2. Roman roads and Roman perceptions of space; 3. The battle of the maps; 4. Christian maps and the Peutinger Map; 5. German emperors, crusades, and an imperial map; 6. Images and the medieval map; 7. Conclusion.

Emily Albu is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of The Normans in their Histories (2000) and has published articles in Imago Mundi, Anglo-Norman Studies, the Haskins Society Journal, and Arethusa. Her research interests include classical receptions, late antiquity, the twelfth century, and medieval historiography and cartography.