These are not labeled or specified geographically, and instead decorate the earth in quick, elegant brushstrokes. Instead of ships, now d’Espinque shows land masses in and around the waterways - islands, mountains, and cities appear in miniature form as rocks, hills, and houses. A similar symbolic map appears in Book XI, De regionibus et provinciis (“On regions and places”). Here, the abstracted sea areas of the first map we saw have become specific waterways. A zoomed-in and more elaborate T-O map is found in Book XIII, De aqua (“On water and fishes”). In Book XI, De Aere (“On the air and weather”), the same little diagram of the world appears again, also against an abstracted blue background that evokes a summer sky, this time illustrating a section of the text about the four cardinal winds: septentrio, auster, favonius, and subsolanus. Instead, the illumination shows the planets as they appear in the night sky, which is the primary datum of western astrology. This does not mean that medieval scholars thought that the earth was at the center of our solar system. Later in the same chapter, we can see the T-O shape repeated in another illuminated diagram, this time of the seven classical planets, distributed in space according to the regions of the zodiac, which are placed in the outer area of the circle. The “O” and “T” shapes themselves had a symbolic meaning in this era, standing for orbis terrarum - “the lands of the earth”. The bottom quadrants are Europe and Africa, with the top semicircle being Asia. As boundary lines, these three aqueous bodies divide the landmasses of this circular world. The three radial segments of the “T” represent bodies of water (the Don, the Nile, and the Mediterranean). The four rivers are the Pishon, Gihon, Tigris and Euphrates, which the same sources said flowed out of Eden and into the world. The orb at their source is Eden, which contemporary scholarship thought was somewhere beyond India (medieval maps oriented the world with East at the top). If you look closely at this image, you will see four rivers flowing down from a glowing spot towards a faint “T”. Evrard d'Espinque’s illuminations depict the world in a semi-abstracted way - and his simplified designs, as demonstrated by the map above, can be confusing to our contemporary eyes, since the decorative elements on the earth’s circumference (birds and water and ships) are embellishments to an otherwise precise and roughly correct rendering.
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