Ravenna Cosmography

The Ravenna Cosmography (Latin: Ravennatis Anonymi Cosmographia, lit. "The Cosmography of the Unknown Ravennate") is a work describing the known world from India to Ireland, compiled by an anonymous cleric in Ravenna in around 700. It consists of five books describing Asia, Africa, and Europe in prose and with lists of toponyms. Textual evidence indicates that the author may have used maps as source material.

Dating All surviving manuscripts are late medieval copies dating from the 13th to 14th centuries. The Cosmography refers to "Saint" Isidore of Seville, who was canonised upon his death in 636; the latest datable reference in the work. The Muslim conquest of the Iberian peninsula is, however, not mentioned, which Rivet & Smith (1979) suggest would normally have been within the Cosmographer's scope, therefore creating a terminus ante quem bracket of around 711. However, they do also note that Saint Isidore was relatively unknown outside of Spain until Christians were forced to flee following the Moorish incursions. Stolte, writing in 1956, argued that the cosmography was finished around 732.

Publication history

Manuscripts

There are three extant prototype manuscript copies of the Cosmography:

Pinder & Parthey (1860) place B (P) as the earliest recension, from which descend A (V) and then C (B). Fitzpatrick-Matthews (2022) places the manuscripts in a stemma whereby V, P and B are all descendents of a common ancestor, X, which through the c.8th century archetype is a cousin of the Guido Geographica. In addition to the three main manuscripts, the Vatican Library also holds a document containing excerpts from the Cosmography made by Riccobaldus Ferrariensis, and there is a copy of the Paris manuscript held in Leiden.

The Vatican manuscript presents the text in two columns, with placenames being capitalised and terminated by a stop. A small number of the words have been abbreviated. The Paris manuscript also uses two columns, capitalisation and stops, but has many more abbreviations than either of the other two. The text is divided into sections by paragraph marks. The Basle manuscript only has a single column, and is more difficult to read than the others. It has more abbreviations than the Vatican copy, but fewer than the Paris copy. There is some evidence that the author has tried to correct or clarify words which were not clear in the original, and there are no stops to separate the place names in the lists, but there are underlined headings to divide up the sections.

Printed Editions The Vatican copy was used as the source for the first publication of the manuscript in 1688 by Porcheron. Pinder & Parthey published the text in 1860, basing it on the Vatican and Paris editions, which he believed to be more reliable than the Basle edition. Parts of the text, notably that covering Britain, have been published by others, including Richmond and Crawford in 1949, but their document showed little regard for which of the manuscripts provided the information. However, it contained photographs of the relevant sections from all three manuscripts, which enabled Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews to reconstruct the text from scratch in 2013 (revised in 2020) for his reassessment of its importance for British geography. The work by Pinder & Parthey (1860) covered the whole document, and was republished in 1990. In a paper by Franz Staab, published in 1976, he noted that the original author claimed to have used works by three others, Athanarid, Heldebald and Marcomir, in the compilation of his own work.

Content The Cosmography is comprised 5 books, the first being an introduction followed by 4 books of toponym gazetteers and short descriptions.

British section

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