Great (new) resource for medieval maps

I have frequently been impressed by the use of digital tools by ancient and medieval scholars seeking to squeeze every once of data out of the few maps surviving from the more distant past. A team of archaeologists at Stanford have been reconstructing the shattered forma urbis Romae (Severan marble plan of Rome), Richard Talbert’s team at UNC-Chapel Hill have explored the Peutinger map of the world known to fourth-century Roman itineraries; and Keith Lilley and Nick Millea have a great site exploring the ca. 1300 Gough map of Britain. (All is not fun and games, however: I just discovered the Bodley’s website on the “Book of Curiosities” — a copy of an eleventh-century Arabic cosmography—was pulled from web servers in September 2017 because it had “reached end-of-life”; no replacement is yet available.)

Now, Martin Foys (UW-Madison, English) has just sent out an email to announce a new stage in the work on Virtual Mappa, a digital platform for the annotation and study of medieval world maps (mappaemundi) from the Latin West. It uses a digital environment that Foys and others have been developing for some time now, called Digital Mappa of DM. Here’s the body of Martin’s email:

Dear All,

I am happy to announce the Digital Mappa (www.digitalmappa.org) Project's third weekly release today, the publication of the open-access Virtual Mappa project inside the DM 2.0 platform:

Virtual Mappa 2.0 is a collaborative project originally in partnership with the British Library, where over a dozen scholars have collaborated to digitally edit a cohort of thirteen early English maps of the world, including the famous Cotton Map, the Cotton Zonal Map and the massive Hereford Map, as well as the Psalter World and List maps, several Higden maps, Mission T-O maps, the Sawley Map, and the Tournai Map of Asia. 

Inscriptions on each map are fully annotated with transcription, translation and notes, and contents are searchable across maps. This project is ongoing, with more maps in the queue to be added later this year. 

This edition is open-access and free for anybody to use - you can find it here:  https://sims2.digitalmappa.org/36 (Chrome/Firefox recommended)

For more features of this edition, with representative screenshots, see the Twitter thread of the project release, here: https://twitter.com/digitalmappa/status/1235216592818130946

Go play and enjoy!!!!