MAP
"It is the map that precedes the territory" (Baudrillard)"
MAPPAEMUNDI
MID-ATLANTIC RIDGE "
PARADISE
from the Persian "pairi-daeza" (walled enclosure)
"Eden began to disappear from mappaemundi in the fifteenth century, but this did not diminish its credibility because now it was assumed to belong to the expanding realm of terra incognita... In the later Middle Ages, the location of paradise shifted more frequently, moving from India to East Africa, and then to the coast and islands of West Africa, the Canaries, Madeiras, Azores, and the Cape Verdes." (Gillis, p69)
"The Portuguese were so certain they had rediscovered Eden in the Azores that they named the first children born there Adam and Eve." (Gillis, p69, footnote: "See John Prest, The Garden of Eden: The Botanic Garden and the Re-creation of Paradise, New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1981, p31")
SAINT BRENDAN'S ISLAND
A phantom island around the Middle Ages. "The notion of roving islands was not at all strange in an era that had few fixed coordinates of either time or space." (Gillig, p52)
SKELLIG MICHAEL
ULTIMA THULE
ultima: noun
Etymology:
Latin, farthest
Date:
1665
Thule: noun
Etymology:
Middle English Tyle, from Old English, from Latin Thule, Thyle, from Greek Thoulē, Thylē
Date:
before 12th century
: the northernmost part of the habitable ancient world (websters dictionary)
UTOPIA
"The relationship between islands and utopia is in many ways as perverse and unnatural as between islands and paradise, for utopian thinking did not originate on islands or ever have much appeal to islanders themselves. Its origins were exclusively continental, the product of Europe's internal upheavals." (Gillis, p73)
