The Hereford World Map: Medieval World Maps and their Context Edited by P.D.A. Harvey The famous Hereford world map dates from around 1300. It is painted on one skin of calf-parchment, nearly 1 mm thick and measuring about 130 cm square. We may marvel that we can still admire and study it. Yet it is by no means the oldest surviving medieval world map, nor was it the largest that once existed. Medieval world maps might be square or round, large or small, extremely simple or amazingly complex. What they show may seem unfamiliar, even grotesque, but their importance is enormous: for their encyclopedic ambition, for their place in the history of art and ideas, for the way they reflect contemporary world views. Setting the Hereford map in context, P.D.A. Harvey and his 24 collaborators present many aspects of these maps for historians, geographers, students of art history, theologians, and everyone interested in the way medieval people thought and the way they saw their world. P.D.A. Harvey is Professor Emeritus in Medieval History in the University of Durham. Besides books and articles on the economic and social history of England in the Middle Ages, he has written extensively on the history of cartography, and his books include The History of Topographical Maps (Thames and Hudson, 1980),Medieval Maps (The British Library, 1991), and Mappa Mundi: the Hereford World Map (The British Library, 1996)