The Translatio imperii and the Spatial Construction of History in the Twelfth Century

ABSTRACT

Based on the theories of Otto of Freising and Hugh of Saint Victor, scholars widely accept that medieval authors conceived of history as a spatial progression of empires from Babylon in the east to Rome in the west. This article reevaluates that assumption, arguing that influential German scholars of the 1930s to 1960s inflated the perceived typicality of Otto’s writing. We see first that this has obscured the biblical exegetical basis of Hugh’s own theory. Surveying contemporary material from hagiographies of Thomas Becket to eschatological ideas among the ‘School of Chartres’, the article argues that it is these exegetical tropes and metaphors of the sun’s rising and setting that underlie twelfth-century discussions of east and west, not the translatio imperii. This underscores not only the novelty and achievement of Otto and Hugh, but also more clearly contextualises their work within their intellectual environment.

KEYWORDS:

• Hugh of Saint Victor
• Otto of Freising
• Translatio imperii
• Translatio studii
• East
• West
• history writing
• School of Chartres

‘The careful student of history will find that learning was transferred from Egypt to the Greeks, then to the Romans, and finally to the Gauls and the Spaniards. And so it is observed that all human power or learning had its origin in the east, but is coming to an end in the west’.¹ So Otto of Freising (d. 1158) defines a central thesis of his Chronica siue historia de duabus civitatibus:² a westward translatio imperii et studii.³ Despite its limited influence on his contemporaries,⁴ Otto’s theory of history has exerted immense influence over modern scholarship as a normative model of medieval historical thought. Although recent work has rightly challenged Otto’s representative status, his ideas continue to exert significant influence, often in subtle ways.⁵

There are real consequences to this often tacit acceptance of Otto’s influence for how we understand medieval historical thought. It has rendered what is for Otto a positive theory about the divine ordering of history into a mere topos, with references to east and west being treated by many scholars as interchangeable with Otto’s theory of translatio imperii et studii. It likewise flattens the complexities of medieval conceptions of space under the fundamentally modern dichotomy of an Asian east and European west, which as scholars of medieval Orientalism have underscored, cannot adequately capture the realities of our medieval sources.⁶ East–west frameworks such as we find in Otto represent an exception to the far more typical use of the three ‘continents’, four directions and eight or twelve winds that structured medieval geographical thought.⁷ Yet despite the centrality of the westward translatio model to this dichotomous vision of medieval spatiality, it has received little focused research as a theme.⁸ The object of this study, therefore, is to excavate Otto’s influence on our understanding of the medieval conceptions of translatio imperii et studii and to reveal the broader biblical exegetical and cosmological discourse that structured medieval conceptions of east and west, with which it has often been conflated.

A Historiographical Prelude

The theme of translatio imperii long predates both Christianity and the Middle Ages, and at least for Latin Christians, it was fundamentally founded on a series of biblical prophecies, most notably Nebuchadnezzar’s dream in the Book of Daniel (2:31–45).⁹ As Daniel describes, King Nebuchadnezzar dreamt of a statue with a head of gold, breast of silver, stomach of bronze, legs of iron and feet of clay and iron, which was crushed by a rock that grew to fill the whole earth. These four metals, it is explained to the king, represent a series of four kingdoms that precede God’s kingdom, which will last forever. Nebuchadnezzar’s kingdom is of course the head of gold, but we are not told what kingdoms the remaining metals represent. A more or less canonical answer was provided for the Latin world, though, in Jerome’s commentary: the gold is Babylon, the silver Medea and Persia, the bronze Macedonia and the iron Rome.¹⁰ Were this not enough to cement the model in Latin Christian minds, the four world empires also served as a structural device for Orosius, who, without reference to Daniel, frames his hugely influential history around a similar series of empires (Babylon, Macedonia, Carthage and Rome), which he links to the four cardinal points: east, north, south and west.¹¹

These ideas were further developed through the Carolingian and Ottonian periods, particularly under the notion of renovatio, and by the turn of the twelfth century had solidified around the idea of translatio.¹² Scholars have tended to focus especially on this latter notion, often conceiving of it not just as a lineal progression of power or knowledge from one kingdom to the next, but as a linear progression of empires through space and time from east to the west, an interpretation that is typically justified in reference to Otto of Freising or Hugh of Saint Victor.¹³ Their notion of translatio has likewise been understood as representative of a new urge to systematise historical laws within the revival of historical thought during the twelfth century.¹⁴ It is on the basis of their writing that John Kirtland Wright, citing George Berkeley’s (d. 1753) prophecy on the progression of empire and learning from Europe to America, already concluded in 1925 that: ‘The idea that “westward the course of empire takes its way” was thus raised in the Middle Ages to a position of theological doctrine and philosophical principle’.¹⁵ Between the reification of westward progression as a doctrine, its foundation in the work of Hugh and Otto, and their teleological anticipation of Berkeley, Wright’s comment represents something of a leitmotif for subsequent scholarship on the translatio.

The influence of Hugh and Otto goes back to role assigned to them within the German Ideen- or Geistesgeschichte of the 1930s to 1960s, which founded the modern study of medieval historical thought.¹⁶ Otto in particular was made to serve as the paradigm of medieval historical writing. Herbert Grundmann, for example, is entirely typical when he explains that although Frutolf of Michelsberg’s chronicle remained authoritative in Germany, it served as but a stepping stone to Otto’s Chronica, the most profound work of its kind in the Middle Ages.¹⁷ From at least the 1950s on a similar trend emerged among French and English historians who, unbound by a nationalist historiography around Otto, focused instead on the historical thought of Hugh of Saint Victor.¹⁸ Paradigmatic here is M.-D. Chenu, who suggests that: ‘the translatio led theologians to observe and formulate another law of history: the movement of civilization from east to west’.¹⁹ By the 1970s, this idea of westward progression was increasingly presented as a general, normative feature of medieval thought. A. J. Gurevich, for example, contrasts the ‘nationalist’ interpretation of the translatio in Chrétien de Troyes with the ‘general Western European attitude’ found in Otto. Hans-Werner Goetz likewise suggests that, given certain difficulties in proving Otto’s dependence on Hugh, Otto might be drawing upon a ‘widespread view’.²⁰ In this way, Hugh and Otto came to serve as figure-heads for medieval historical consciousness and their idea of westward development as paradigmatic of the translatio imperii.

The Westward Traslatio imperii in Hugh of Saint Victor and Otto of Freising

The idea of westward development in Hugh and Otto is hardly the anodyne repetition of a common topos. It serves an important theoretical function for both authors and imparts a very specific conception of space onto their idea of history and its significance. Hugh describes the core notion with characteristic clarity:

The order of place and the order of time seem to run together in almost everything according to the series of events. And thus it seems to have been established by divine providence that those things which were done at the beginning of time would occur in the east – as if at the beginning of the world – and then, as time flows forth towards the end, the sum of things should follow this stream all the way to the west, so that in this we might recognise that the end of the age approaches, since the course of events has now reached the end of the world. For that reason, the first person made was set in the east, in the garden of Eden, so that the offspring of the future might stream forth into the world from that beginning. Likewise after the flood, the beginning of kingdoms and the head of the world was among the Assyrians, Chaldeans and Medes, in eastern parts. It came next to the Greeks. Finally, near the end of the age, the highest power reached the Romans in the west, living as it were at the end of the world.²¹

The geographical ordering of time reveals the providential ordering of history and its westward flow orients the reader’s contemplation of history towards its end. It is significant that Hugh’s theory is found only in his three tracts on Noah’s Ark, all expressly contemplative theological works.²² No similar discussion is to be found in either his Chronica or Descriptio mappe mundi, nor does their content reveal any influence of a theory of westward progression.²³ This should come as no surprise. Hugh is unconcerned about applying his theory of westward development to world history because, like the Ark tracts themselves, his idea of a westward translatio is not about secular history, but rather the visible signs of God’s salvific work.²⁴ The explicit aim of Hugh’s theory is to turn the reader from earthly things to the divine through contemplation of the eschatological progression of the works of restoration.²⁵

We find the same contemplative and eschatological fingerprints on Otto’s theory as well, where westward progression likewise serves to highlight history’s approaching end. As Otto explains in the general prologue, the miseries of history have been established by ‘a wise and proper dispensation of the Creator’ to deter us from its vicissitudes and, ‘set down as it were at the end of the time’, Otto’s contemporaries observe the growing decrepitude of Rome, ‘[whose] fall foreshadows the dissolution of the whole structure’.²⁶ This is revealed centrally by the westward transfer of human knowledge and power, which occurs ‘that thereby the transitoriness and decay of all things human may be displayed’.²⁷ Otto reiterates this point in the prologue to Book 5: As with empire, so now that learning has reached the extreme west (ad ultimum occidentem) ‘we are in position not merely to believe but also actually to see the things which were predicted, since we behold the world … already failing and, so to speak, drawing the last breath of extremest old age’.²⁸ The eschatological aim is written into the very fabric of Otto’s text, which almost alone among histories of the Middle Ages includes a book on the eschaton.²⁹

Although Otto’s theory of westward development shares Hugh’s eschatological aims, it is important to remember that unlike Hugh, Otto is writing a history. As such, he is concerned about applying his theory to world history and remains attentive to this idea of east–west progression throughout the text.³⁰ We can see this attention to space in his adaptation of Orosius, who extols the universality of Augustus’s empire by recounting how, while in Spain, he received gifts from the Scythians and Indians, noting explicitly how the east and north supplicate the west.³¹ In Otto’s adaptation of this story, however, the north has been removed and it is now only ‘the nations of the remotest east [who come] to the farthest west (ad ultimum occidentem)’.³² This may anticipate the arrival of Armenian envoys ‘from almost the farthest east (ultimo … oriente)’ to a council at Viterbo in 1145 (at which Otto was present), where they ask for Rome to intercede on behalf of the Armenian church in a theological dispute with the Greeks and, more importantly, affirm their subjection to the Roman church.³³ The change of context from exegesis to history likewise results in a change of focus for Otto regarding the implications of this westward progression. While for Hugh it represents the stability of divine providence, for Otto it serves to underscore his overarching theme of mutabilitas.³⁴ Despite this difference in interpretation, the general theory and its underlying spatiality remain same.

Though there is no direct textual link, there can be little doubt that Otto’s idea of westward development was based on Hugh’s theory.³⁵ It is quite likely that Hugh was one of Otto’s teachers in Paris at around the time he was producing the Ark tracts, but even if they never met in Paris, the diffusion of Hugh’s writings in Southern Germany and Austria strongly suggests Otto’s familiarity with Hugh’s De archa.³⁶ Otto was the driving influence behind his father’s foundation, in the mid-1130s, of Heiligenkreuz, the first Cistercian monastery in Austria.³⁷ Otto’s father, Leopold III, describes in its charter how Otto inspired the foundation and how Morimond, where Otto was a monk and from 1138 abbot, supplied some of the original monks, including the first abbot, Gottschalk.³⁸ A booklist dating from no later than 1147, coincidentally around the time that Otto was finishing the first recensions of his Chronica, attests to the presence at Heiligenkreuz of a still extant early copy of Hugh’s De archa.³⁹ This manuscript is also closely related to another twelfth-century copy of De archa from Morimond.⁴⁰ Indeed, Morimond had longstanding connections with the German speaking world via the cathedral school in Cologne. Its early community even included another uncle of Frederick Barbarossa besides Otto: Konrad, brother of Judith of Bavaria.⁴¹ Even if Otto was not personally involved with bringing this manuscript to Heiligenkreuz, then, he certainly had access to one at Morimond. It is clear, therefore, that Hugh’s mystical works were available to Otto and, given the evident similarities, there is no reason to hypothesise further sources. All other things being equal, we ought to read Otto as building upon Hugh’s theoretical innovation.⁴²

Escaping Otto’s Influence on Our Interpretation of Hugh’s De archa

But are all other things equal? Historians have offered a range of possible exponents of a westward progression of history to fill in the blanks around Hugh and Otto.⁴³ While there is a range of examples of east and west being used as quasi-temporal categories, they are rarely associated with the translatio imperii et studii or the sort of eschatological progression that vivifies Hugh’s and Otto’s accounts.⁴⁴ Indeed, the dominant usage has little to do with historical progression at all, but develops rather out of a rich tradition of biblical interpretation and cosmological metaphors going back at least to the early Fathers.⁴⁵ In this context, Otto’s normativity can already be seen creeping into the interpretation of Hugh as a paradigm example of east–west progression. As such, it will be useful to return to Hugh and reconsider his account of westward progression outside of the context of Otto’s subsequent historicising development. This will provide a basis on which to consider the ideas of east and west found in some of the other authors that have been proposed for this group.

In line with the longstanding tradition of viewing Hugh as standing fundamentally at the intersection of history and theology, there is a tendency to present Hugh’s idea of east-west progression as a standalone theory of history.⁴⁶ This decontextualisation obscures both the fundamentally exegetical basis of Hugh’s presentation and the broader spatial context within which he presents it. As already noted, Hugh’s theory of east-west development is found at the very end of De archa within the context of his discussion of the opera restaurationis. As Hugh explains in his De sacramentis, the opera restaurationis are first and foremost the ‘subject matter of all the Divine Scriptures’, to be contrasted with secular literature whose subject matter is the opera conditionis.⁴⁷ The transition between these works corresponds with the neoplatonic ascent from the visible to the invisible: ‘The elect ascend from the works of foundation through the works of restoration to the author of foundation and restoration’.⁴⁸ This process of discerning meaning through the works of restoration is therefore exegetical at its very foundation, since only in the scriptures do things themselves hold meaning, by which we may recognise the divine wisdom.⁴⁹

Returning then to Hugh’s theory, the exegetical foundation becomes evident when we fill in the broader spatial context of the passage. In all three cases, Hugh addresses not just east and west but also north and south, with both De archa and the Libellus presenting them as Babylon and Egypt respectively.⁵⁰ These also serve as Hugh’s example of the significative potential of space in his exegetical handbook, De scripturis.⁵¹ Hugh asserts that what happens in the north and south is proof of divine providence, as can be seen in the placement of Egypt to the south of Jerusalem and Babylon to the north.⁵² To the modern reader, this comparison may seem rather more puzzling than the ostensibly straightforward idea of westward progression. The geography is already somewhat unusual, for while Egypt is plausibly south of Jerusalem, Babylon can hardly be considered north. Rather, as in Orosius, it is typically located in the south of Mesopotamia on most medieval maps and thus east or northeast of Jerusalem.⁵³ Likewise in Hugh’s own geography Babylon is situated at the south end of western Asia, and on the so-called ‘Munich Map’ (the closest extant map to the one used by Hugh in the abbey of Saint Victor) it has been set even further south on the Euphrates than usual – almost directly east of Jerusalem.⁵⁴

In keeping with the opera restaurationis, Hugh is not describing earthly geography, but biblical geography.⁵⁵ Babylon’s presentation as northern is based especially in the book of Jeremiah, which begins with God’s warning that ‘from the north shall an evil break forth upon all the inhabitants of the land’ (Jer. 1:14), foretelling the Babylonian exile described later in the book.⁵⁶ The point is further underscored when we come to Hugh’s interpretation of Babylon and Egypt as northern and southern, which is not spatial but etymological in the first instance. Egypt means ‘darkness’ and Babylon ‘confusion’. These are commonplace patristic interpretations of their Hebrew names.⁵⁷ The role of north and south is next grounded in a cosmological analogy. Egypt, due to the warm south wind, represents the world ‘set in the heat of carnal desire’ and, with the implicit coldness of the north, Babylon signifies hell ‘where eternal trembling dwells’.⁵⁸ The opposition of north and south is characteristically associated with the opposition of winds in Song of Songs 4:16, which are normally understood as the devil and Holy Spirit respectively.⁵⁹ Hugh’s negative characterisation of the south is therefore unusual, albeit not entirely unprecedented. There is an important line of interpretation based in Bede’s commentary, according to which the north and south winds represent two trials for the church: the world’s harshness and pleasures.⁶⁰ Hugh’s contribution is to conjoin this idea of the south with the more typical presentation of Egypt as representing carnal desire.⁶¹ It is through this clever blending of exegetical tropes that Hugh interprets the Israelites’ departure from Egypt and subsequent exile in Babylon as the fall of man, which subjects humankind to sin through ignorance and concupiscence, and thereafter to the torments of hell.

That Hugh’s understanding of north and south can only be properly appreciated within the exegetical tradition ought to raise similar suspicions about his interpretation of east and west. Here too we can find clear engagement with the biblical text and patristic tradition. The use of the Bible is already evident in Hugh’s phrase: ‘in the east (oriente), as if in the beginning (principio) of the world’.⁶² The self-conscious parallel of oriens and principium clearly echoes the double reading of Genesis 2:8, where God planted paradise either ‘from the beginning (a principio)’ in the Vulgate or ‘in Eden to the east (ad orientem)’ in the common vetus text, found especially in the writings of Augustine.⁶³ This double reading is highlighted explicitly in Bede’s commentary on Genesis, which was incorporated into the Glossa ordinaria, and was evidently well known to Hugh’s students, at least through that version.⁶⁴ Finally, Hugh’s subsequent reference to Eden further underscores the allusion.⁶⁵

While less directly grounded in the biblical text itself, Hugh’s association of west with finis can also be linked to the patristic tradition and again Augustine. Notions of finality, particularly of humans or the world, are central to its exegetical image.⁶⁶ In this case, we can find a plausible basis for Hugh’s presentation in Augustine’s interpretation of the setting sun in a vetus version of Genesis 15:17: ‘when the sun had already set (erat ad occasum), a fire was made, and behold a smoking furnace and torches of fire … ’⁶⁷ For Augustine, the setting sun represents the approaching end of the age, looking towards the darkness and fire of Antichrist and the last judgement. But if we attend to the ambiguity inherent in the phrase solis occasus as between ‘west’ and ‘setting sun’, we can find an almost Hugonian spatiality in Augustine’s fundamentally temporal interpretation: ‘Just as the affliction of the city of God … under Antichrist … is signified by Abraham’s “horror of great darkness” near the sunset [or west], that is the now approaching end of the age; so also at the sunset [or west], that is at that very end, the day of judgement is signified by the fire’.⁶⁸ While Augustine, no doubt, has a very different interpretation in mind from Hugh, the flexibility of the vocabulary and imagery creates space for this sort of adaptation. Thus here too, as with north and south before, it is the exegetical tradition, and especially Augustine, that forms the fundamental basis of Hugh’s presentation.

Exegetical and Cosmological Ideas of East and West

Whether or not we ultimately find a verbal echo of Augustine’s setting sun in Hugh’s approaching western seaboard, this sort of cosmological imagery of the rising and setting sun is ubiquitous in the interpretation of east and west throughout the patristic and medieval tradition. Now that we have seen how this functions in Hugh’s text, we can turn to our list of putative proponents of a westward progression of history to show how this solar imagery, rather than any notion of translatio, grounds their understanding of east and west.⁶⁹

This is especially evident in what is perhaps the most enduring example in anglophone scholarship, Severian of Gabala.⁷⁰ In his fifth homily on Creation, Severian explains that Eden was set in the east: ‘so as to make clear that just as these lights rise, travel to the west and set, so too [the human being] must travel from life to death and set, on the model of the lights, likewise having a different rising in the resurrection of the dead’.⁷¹ This transition from east to west does not represent, as Wright suggests, the development of history from the beginning of the world to its end, but the salvation-historical relationship of Adam and Christ in the Fall and Incarnation. As Severian explains, just as Adam moved west to his death, so death is imparted upon all earthly things. This is a very typical presentation of westward movement as the Fall of Man.⁷² In keeping with the solar imagery, this movement also involves a return to the east (rising) in the Incarnation of Christ: ‘Christ came and caused the one who had set to rise’.⁷³ This is because the second east is not a place, but Christ himself, whose name is east (Zech. 6:12). As such, the key to this interpretation is not an underlying notion of the progress of civilisation or the history of the world, but Paul’s statement: ‘as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all shall be made alive’ (1 Cor. 15:22), which Severian cites at the end of the passage. So while there is, no doubt, a kernel of geography in Severian’s reference to the placement of Eden, the overarching use of east and west is cosmological not geographical, and the movement is sacramental not literal-historical. This fits comfortably within the extensive exegetical and liturgical tradition of using east and west as symbols of beginning and end, life and death, and Christ and Satan, that goes back to at least Origen.⁷⁴ This opposition is seldom geographical in focus and can hardly be equated with a historically progressive translatio.⁷⁵ Rather, the core image in the exegetical tradition is Christ’s salvific work and its representation through the rising and setting sun.

While the exegetical function of these solar metaphors by no means presupposes an east-west historical progression, the two are not wholly unrelated. We find this solar metaphor operationalised in a range of para-exegetical contexts and, as with Severian, this is often what we find when we look more closely at our list of candidates to fill in the blanks around Hugh and Otto. The illuminating role of the sun and its connection with east and west are fundamental metaphors for Christianisation. This idea is based paradigmatically on the role of Christ as sol iustitiae: ‘For Christ will be revealed in the full light of his majesty, and just as lightning comes from the east and spreads its light over the whole world all the way into the west, so also the son of man coming with his angels will illuminate this world so that every man shall believe and all flesh shall be saved’.⁷⁶ This imagery has a wide influence outside of biblical exegesis proper. Peter the Venerable, for example, makes use of this trope in praise of the Patriarch of Jerusalem: ‘the eternal sun, more brightly by far than the morning sun, illuminates the darkness of our west from your east’.⁷⁷ Avitus of Vienne makes use of this imagery in his correspondence on behalf of Sigismund of Burgundy to navigate the political-religious landscape between the emperor Anastasius and the Frankish king Clovis.⁷⁸ Aeneas of Paris leveraged these exegetical categories in a ninth-century polemic to emphasise the equality of the Greek and Latin churches.⁷⁹ This imagery of illumination did not need to be restricted to an east-west framework either and could also be situated within a quadripartite schema terminating in the north, as in Sigebert of Gembloux’s second life of St Lambert.⁸⁰

There is also a common inversion of this illumination metaphor, which Klaus Oschema identifies as the trope of ex occidente lux, that underlies the ideas of two further figures on our list: Gerald of Wales and Notker the Stammerer.⁸¹ Oschema finds this trope developing especially around the cult of Thomas Becket, as exemplified by Benedict of Peterborough’s suggestion that Becket’s life and martyrdom ‘illuminate the whole world, like rays emerging from the west’.⁸² The exegetical backdrop shines through especially with William FitzStephen, who sets Thomas the Apostle in India and Becket in England on either side of Christ who, situated in Jerusalem, represents the unifying centre of their illuminative roles.⁸³ This is precisely what we find in Gerald of Wales’s Expugnatio Hibernica.⁸⁴ After noting this parallel with the Apostle Thomas, he includes the same trope in a prophecy of Merlin Silvester:⁸⁵ ‘while the sun rises in its setting … the daylight illuminates with a new brightness the mists of the western land and of the closing age of the world’.⁸⁶ While Gerald’s equation of western space and time certainly evokes Hugh’s own use of east and west – and given Gerald’s education in the schools of Paris just a few decades after Hugh’s death, this may not be a coincidence – this is hardly a vision of linear westward progression, let alone translatio.⁸⁷ The trope, however, has a longer history than Oschema identifies, as we see in Notker the Stammerer’s praise of Bede in his Notatio de viris illustribus: ‘God the regulator of natural things, who on the fourth day produced the sun of earthly creation from the east, in the sixth age of the world directed a new sun from the west to illuminate the whole world’.⁸⁸ As both Notker and Gerald show, this trope could serve as a point of connection between spatial and temporal conceptions of the west, but this can hardly be considered a central feature of the trope. It builds rather upon the exegetical connection of west with notions of finality and the eschaton as we have already seen in Hugh and Otto, as well as the rising-setting-rising triad that we saw with Severian.

East and West beyond Exegesis in the Twelfth Century

I have argued thus far that by rereading Hugh without looking towards Otto as an endpoint, we can better appreciate the rich exegetical tradition he draws upon. It is this exegetical material that grounds his interpretation of the north-south and east-west axes of the Ark, and it is Hugh’s own theoretical innovation to connect these exegetical ideas of east and west with the translatio imperii through the idea of an eschatological, spatio-temporal progression.⁸⁹ What is more, I have suggested that many authors who have been identified as espousing such a westward translatio are instead building upon these cosmological and exegetical tropes. But this is not the whole story. From the twelfth century on, we start to see more clearly temporal uses of east and west in contexts that are not so closely connected with the exegetical tradition. It is here that I would like to suggest a new, wider context for Hugh’s and Otto’s temporal and eschatological ideas about east and west in writings of the schools, and ultimately among authors associated with the so-called ‘School of Chartres’.

Probably of southern German origin, Honorius Augustodunensis spent some time at Canterbury around the turn of the twelfth century, before settling for the majority of his life in Regensburg.⁹⁰ It is here that Honorius likely completed his hugely popular encyclopedia, the Imago mundi, in which he provides a striking analogy for the flow of time: ‘It is as if a rope were drawn from east to west, which collected daily by coiling would eventually be entirely taken in’.⁹¹ To my knowledge, no clear precedent for this metaphor has been identified. Karl Kinsella notes an interesting parallel with Honorius’s presentation of James and John as two ropes encompassing east and west, but highlights more broadly the connection with Hugh’s Ark.⁹² Christian Gellinek also points to the use of rope as a metaphor for time by Hildegard of Bingen, whose five quasi-Danielian beasts in the north each have a rope extending from their mouth to the west, which she tells us represent their duration.⁹³ But Hildegard also makes use of a solar metaphor here, interpreting the west as ‘these unstable times [that] fall with the setting sun’.⁹⁴ So also with Honorius, as Fabian Schwarzbauer is surely correct in noting, the fundamental basis is once again a solar metaphor.⁹⁵ As we have seen, east and west already contain notions of beginning and end. Indeed, this is how Isidore defines the terms east and west, since the sun rises in the east and the day ‘perishes’ (interire) in the west.⁹⁶ With this in mind, we can readily see how Honorius may have adapted the definition of time that he found in the Munich computus, preserved in a ninth-century manuscript from St Emmeram in Regensburg: ‘time is the interval extending from the beginning (principio) to the end (finem)’.⁹⁷ If this is the case, it presents an interesting parallel with Hugh’s equation of oriens/principium and occidens/finis. Honorius’s text, however, almost certainly predates both Hugh’s and Hildegard’s.⁹⁸ What this shows, therefore, is the prevalence and malleability of our solar metaphor in the early decades of the twelfth century, as we see Honorius branching off the same root out of which Hugh’s and Otto’s idea of westward progression sprouted.⁹⁹

We find the same malleability at work in the broader reception of Hugh’s writings through Hermann of Carinthia. A student of Thierry of Chartres, Hermann was foremost a translator of Arabic scientific works. Alongside Robert of Ketton, he was one of a group of translators based between the Languedoc and Ebro valleys around the 1140s. In 1143 he produced his own magnum opus, the De essentiis, a cosmological treatise that represents an early fusion of traditional Latin and new Arabic sources.¹⁰⁰ Discussing the location of Paradise, Hermann presents a highly original adaptation of the Hugonian theme. Unique among the authors surveyed here, he explains that ‘a substantial opinion’ sets Paradise roughly a 44-day journey west of Lisbon, since we find signs of it both in the east and the west.¹⁰¹ After noting the typical arguments, that humans were created in the east and that the blessedness of Fortune Islands in the west suggests their proximity to Paradise, Hermann introduces his own observation:

Finally, it is reasonably certain that the series of things, as we have said, came to be in the east, and has gradually advanced into the rest of the world, because very many things survive in that part of the earth up to the present day – even kinds of animals – which have not reached as far as us yet. For no one ever has truly heard that there have existed round the Don and the Mediterranean Sea, giants or pigmies, griffens or yales, the unicorn or bristle-bearing bulls, or others of that kind, unless in so far as legends mention that Sicily once was inhabited by Cyclops, and Hercules drove the Centaurs from Greece. Why mention these? For up to now no tigers, panthers, lions or ostriches live in Europe, nor have the very many other kinds of animals, of which some have now reached as far as the lower parts of Asia, and some as far as the furthest boundaries of Libya … ¹⁰²

Hermann alludes here to Hugh of Saint Victor’s theory of a westward translatio.¹⁰³ His spatial progression, however, is completely different. Insofar as history is progressing towards the west, it is only by the implication that Europe is the farthest point from the east. Furthermore, there is no reference here to translatio or eschatological expectation. Finally, insofar as translatio studii lies in the background here, as Burnett suggests, it cannot be related to Hugh’s and Otto’s spatial model, but would have been drawn rather from one of the two dominant classical traditions of translatio artium – specifically the Greek-Patristic tradition where ‘east’ is a generic designator for an Indian, Egyptian or Chaldean origin.¹⁰⁴

There is a wider context to Hermann’s interest in the east as a point of historical origin within the so called ‘School of Chartres’. We can see this especially in a strand of eschatological thought in the work of William of Conches and Bernardus Silvestris.¹⁰⁵ Given his intellectual reputation, the details of William’s life are surprisingly opaque. He likely took up a post either in Paris or Chartres around 1120 and sometime later came to serve as tutor to a young Henry II in the household of Geoffrey Plantagenet.¹⁰⁶ In his Dragmaticon, dedicated to Geoffrey, William takes an even more scientific approach to the location of Paradise, linking it to his quasi-evolutionary account of life.¹⁰⁷ Just as different imbalances in the elemental composition of the primordial mud produced different animals – lions from fire, cows from earth and pigs from water – so also humans are a product of elemental harmony: ‘The human body was made from certain mud, in which the qualities of the elements harmonise equally, in the eastern region, since it is more temperate than other regions’.¹⁰⁸ This theme leads William to an eschatological aside about lifecycles. For just as the common year has four seasons (of birth, growth, decline and death), so the ‘great year’ has two seasons of creation and two of decline and death, ‘whence we believe that the end of the world approaches, for we see the sizes of bodies diminishing and lives shortening … and as at the beginning of the new year we see those things which are dead return to life, so at the beginning of the following age those who are dead will be able to return to life’.¹⁰⁹ The section concludes with William’s note that, as it is the most temperate season, the world was created in spring.¹¹⁰ Thus from spring to spring, Paradise brings with it a notion of cosmic temporality and a scientific eschatology grounded in its eastern location and a similar set of cosmic metaphors.

The link between this ‘Chartrian’ material and our historical eschatology is at last brought into clear focus with the Cosmographia of Bernardus Silvestris.¹¹¹ Bernardus is a no less enigmatic figure, who likely taught at the school in Tours and finished his Cosmographia in time to present it to Eugenius III when he visited France 1147.¹¹² Bernardus’s analysis of Paradise, like William’s temperate east, is grounded in a contrast with the disorder of the wider world. The climax of the Microcosmus, the second of the work’s two parts, is the creation of humankind; it begins with the goddesses Urania and Nature fleeing the chaos of the elements on earth for Gramision, ‘a secluded and remote spot near the eastern horizon’.¹¹³ All manner of delightful and useful flora grow here constantly in the perpetual spring the region enjoys.¹¹⁴ Unlike William’s looser association of the east with the first spring in the dynamic progression of cosmic seasons, Bernardus crystallises this spatio-temporality in the eternal spring of Paradise: ‘upon which the Sun, still mild at its first rising, shines lovingly, for its fire is in its first age, and has no power to harm’.¹¹⁵ With this first description of Paradise (not yet named Gramision), in the Megacosmus, the first part of the Cosmographia, the eternal spring is represented by the sun’s perpetual first rising and constant ‘primeval’ fire.¹¹⁶ The static perdurance of this state is highlighted by the shift to and from mundane geography. We get to Paradise by moving east from India’s burning sun and are returned to the scattered paradisal groves of the world with the note that: ‘the first Man dwelt [here] as a guest – but too brief a time for a guest’.¹¹⁷

The eschatological force of this idea is made explicit in the parallel discussion of humanity’s creation in the Microcosmus. Urania, Nature and the newly met Physis are tasked by Noys with creating humanity. Each is given a plan of their domain in the form of the mirror of providence, table of fate and book of memory. Studying the table of fate, Urania eventually finds a page on which the first man, from whom the ‘long chain of fate’ flows, is depicted and ‘the succession of the ages, introduced by the pure primal state of gold is seen degenerating little by little, to end in an age of iron’.¹¹⁸ This eschatological vision, with its evocation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, may seem out of place in the Timaean cosmology of the schools, but the ‘out of Eden’ spatiality here is just the same as Hermann’s. The eastern Gramision, guest residence of the first human, is a physical manifestation of the spatio-temporal beginning of history in Adam through a return to our solar metaphor, but even within this eschatological frame there is no spatial terminus; all we have is the expulsion from paradise.

Conclusion

I hope to have shown that Otto of Freising’s east–west translatio imperii et studii, with which I began this article, cannot be considered interchangeable with the wider exegetical and cosmological ideas just examined; nor can the association of the translatio imperii with a westward progression of history that Otto drew from Hugh of Saint Victor be considered representative of medieval historical thought. Their work is, rather, built upon a deeper and more pervasive set of exegetical traditions that had their origins in the Patristic era around the sun’s westward movement and the eastern location of Paradise. From the twelfth century on, we see their influence spread across a broader range of para-exegetical and cosmological writings, especially flowing out of the burgeoning schools from Honorius and the circle of Thomas Becket to the ‘School of Chartres’. Yet the application of these ideas to geographical space or historical time is both rare and presents a raft of interpretive difficulties. While east is frequently understood as a site of spatio-temporal origin, there is no clear tradition that determines its trajectory from there. It is specifically in the work of Hugh and Otto that we find a clear notion of westward development and it is only by dispensing with their representative status that we can look beyond their own achievement to the much richer and more varied tradition within which their ideas were situated.¹¹⁹

From the twelfth century on, we do find an increasing use of east–west frameworks in historical writing and for good reason.¹²⁰ Growing concern about and discussion of the relationship of eastern and western Churches, the advent of the crusades and the growth of Islam in the European imagination all provided contexts for discussions of east and west, as we see clearly in histories of the First Crusade.¹²¹ But we must not overstate the significance of east-west opposition. Medieval conceptions of space did not revolve around such a single, monolithic framework, but were characterised precisely by the intersection of multiple spatial models.¹²² The translatio rarely served as a basis for these models and still less Otto’s westward progression. Moving beyond the mid-twelfth century, David Louis Gassman details how Hugh’s and Otto’s east-west model remained a marginal theme, adopted by Godfrey of Viterbo, following Otto, and John of Garland, but dying out rapidly in the thirteenth century as the translatio studii focused increasingly on the University of Paris.¹²³ The idea of westward progression reemerges with the discovery of the new world in the sixteenth century and the foundation of the United States in the eighteenth, but it is only in the work of thinkers like Voltaire, Hegel and especially Comte that our modern notion of the ‘West’ and westward progression solidifies.¹²⁴ These ideas remain with us today, but we must not mistake their familiarity for common currency in the past.

Acknowledgements

This paper was written with the support of funding from the Leverhulme Trust as part of a project on ‘The Idea of the West in the Long Twelfth Century’. I would like to thank Professor Ingrid Baumgärtner and Dr Elizabeth Biggs for their helpful comments on late drafts of this article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust.

Notes on contributors

Eric Wolever

Eric Wolever has most recently been a post-doctoral researcher in medieval history at the University of Kassel, where he recently completed a project about ‘Ideas of the West in the Long Twelfth Century’, funded by the Leverhulme trust.

Notes

¹ The following abbreviations are used in this article: MGH: Monumenta Germaniae Historica; PL: Patrologia cursus completus, series Latina; CCCM: Corpus Christianorum, continuatio mediaevalis; CCSL: Corpus Christianorum series Latina; CSEL: Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum Latinorum.

Otto of Freising, Chronica siue historia de duabus civitatibus 1.prol, ed. Adolf Hofmeister. MGH Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim editi 45 (Hannover: Hahn, 1912), 8; trans. Charles Christopher Mierow, The Two Cities: A Chronicle of Universal History to the Year 1146 A. D. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1928; repr. 2002), 95. All translations are the author’s unless otherwise noted. Mierow’s use of ‘orient’ has in every case been replaced with ‘east’ and to avoid confusion, all cardinal direction terms in quotations have been written in lower case.

² On Otto see Hans-Werner Goetz, Das Geschichtsbild Ottos von Freising. Beihefte zum Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 19 (Cologne: Böhlau, 1984); Elisabeth Mégier, ‘Tamquam lux post tenebras, oder: Ottos von Freising Weg von der Chronik zu den Gesta Friderici’, Mediaevistik 3 (1990): 131–267; Joachim Ehlers, Otto von Freising: Ein Intellektueller im Mittelalter (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2013).

³ Authoritative still on the translatio imperii is Werner Goez, Translatio Imperii: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Geschichtsdenkens und der politischen Theorien im Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit (Tübingen: Mohr, 1958). The fundamental responses to Goez’s presentation of the translatio studii are Adriaan Gerard Jongkees, ‘Translatio Studii: Les avatars d’un thème médiéval’, in Miscellanea in memoriam Jan Frederick Niermeyer, ed. Dirk Peter Blok (Groningen: J. B. Wolters, 1967), 41–51 and Franz Josef Worstbrock, ‘Translatio artium: Über die Herkunft und Entwicklung einer kulturhistorischen Theorie’, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 47, no. 1 (1965): 1–22. For a recent treatment of both, see Enrico Fenzi, ‘Translatio studii e translatio imperii: Appunti per un percorso’, Interfaces 1 (2015): 170–208.

⁴ Goez, Translatio Imperii, 121–2; Goetz, Geschichtsbild, 316.

⁵ Tuomas M. S. Lehtonen, ‘History, Tragedy and Fortune in Twelfth-Century Historiography with Special Reference to Otto of Freising’s Chronica’, in Historia: The Concept and Genres in the Middle Ages, eds. Tuomas M.S. Lehtonen and Paivi Maria Mehtonen (Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 2000), 29–49 (32–33); Mégier, ‘Tamquam lux’, 131, 237 n. 5; Matthew Kempshall, Rhetoric and the Writing of History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 107.

⁶ Suzanne Conklin Akbari, ‘From Due East to True North: Orientalism and Orientation’, in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 19–34 (19–20); Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Oriet 1100–1450 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 2–3, 20–66; Kim M. Phillips, Before Orientalism: Asian Peoples and Cultures in European Travel Writing, 1245–1510 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 18–22, 60–64.

⁷ Akbari, Idols in the East, 20–66; Ingrid Baumgärtner, ‘Winds and Continents: Concepts for Structuring the World and Its Parts’, in Mapping Narrations – Narrating Maps: Concepts of the World in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, eds. Daniel Gneckow, Anna Hollenbach and Phillip Landgrebe. Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture 34 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2022), 23–72; Nathalie Bouloux, ‘Ordering and Reading the World: The Maps in Lambert of Saint-Omer’s “Liber Floridus”’, in Geography and Religious Knowledge in the Middle Ages, ed. Christoph Mauntel. Das Mittelalter, Beihefte 14 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2021), 85–108 (97–99). On the three ‘continents’, see now especially Christoph Mauntel, Die Erdteile in der Weltordnung des Mittelalters: Asien – Europa – Afrika. Monographien zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 71 (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 2023).

⁸ Two notable exceptions are Stephen McKenzie, ‘The Westward Progression of History on Medieval Mappaemundi: An Investigation of the Evidence’, in The Hereford World Map: Medieval World Maps and Their Context, ed. P.D.A. Harvey (London: British Library, 2006), 335–44 and David Louis Gassman, ‘Translatio Studii: A Study of Intellectual History in the Thirteenth Century’ (PhD diss., Cornell University, 1973).

⁹ Andrew B. Perrin and Loren T. Stuckenbruck, eds., Four Kingdom Motifs before and beyond the Book of Daniel. Themes in Biblical Narrative 28 (Leiden: Brill, 2021); M. L. West, The East Face of Helicon: West Asiactic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 312–19; Joseph Ward Swain, ‘The Theory of the Four Monarchies Opposition History under the Roman Empire’, Classical Philology 35, no. 1 (1940): 1–21.

¹⁰ Jerome, Commentarii In Danielem libri III 1.2, ed. Franciscus Glorie. CCSL 75A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1964), 794; cf. Augustine, De ciuitate Dei 4.7, 20.23, ed. Bernhard Dombart and Alfons Kalb. CCSL 47–48. 2 vols. (Turnhout: Brepols, 1955), 1:103–04, 2:742.

¹¹ Paulus Orosius, Historiarum adversum paganos libri VII 2.1.5, ed. Karl Zangemeister (Leipzig: Teubner, 1889), 35. On a possible basis in Daniel 7:2, see Peter Van Nuffelen, Orosius and the Rhetoric of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 48–49 and Andrew Merrills, History and Geography in Late Antiquity. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, Fourth Series 64 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 53.

¹² So Goez, Translatio imperii, 104–11. For a recent reevaluation of this relationship between translatio and renovatio from the eleventh century, see Claudia Wittig, ‘Political Didacticism in the Twelfth Century: The Middle-High German Kaiserchronik’, in Universal Chronicles in the High Middle Ages, eds. Michele Campopiano and Henry Bainton. Writing History in the Middle Ages 4 (York: York Medieval Press, 2017), 95–119 and Uta Goerlitz, Literarische Konstruktion (vor-)nationaler Identität seit dem Annolied: Analysen und Interpretationen zur deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters (11.-16. Jahrhundert). Quellen und Forschungen zur Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte 45 [279] (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007), 173–77.

¹³ Joseph Schmidlin, Die geschichtsphilosophische und kirchenpolitische Weltanschauung Ottos von Freising: Ein Beitrag zur mittelalterlichen Geistesgeschichte. Studien und Darstellungen aus dem Gebiete der Geschichte 4/2–3 (Freiburg: Herder, 1906), 35; John Kirtland Wright, The Geographical Lore of the Time of the Crusades. American Geographical Society Research Series 15 (New York: American Geographical Society, 1925), 233–35; M.-D. Chenu, Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West, trans. Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), 186–88; Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkley: University of California Press, 1967), 276–78. Recent examples include: Jay Rubenstein, Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream: The Crusades, Apocalyptic Prophecy, and the End of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 31; Richard K. Emmerson, ‘Apocalypse and/as History’, in Medieval Historical Writing: Britain and Ireland, 500–1500, eds. Jennifer Jahner, Emily Steiner, and Elizabeth M. Tyler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 54; Ehlers, Otto von Freising, 192; Elizabeth Lapina, Warfare and the Miraculous in the Chronicles of the First Crusade (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), 122–75; Natalia I. Petrovskaia, Medieval Welsh Perceptions of the Orient. Cursor Mundi 21 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 1–47.

¹⁴ Chenu, Nature, Man and Society, 162–201; Goez, Translatio, 105–06; R. W. Southern, ‘Hugh of St Victor and the Idea of Historical Development’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 21 (1971): 159–79; Peter Classen, ‘Res Gestae, Universal History, Apocalypse: Visions of Past and Future’, in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, eds. Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 403–04; cf. Wright, Geographical Lore, 233–35.

¹⁵ Wright, Geographical Lore, 235. Wright provides no citation, but the quotation is originally from George Berkeley’s ‘Verses on America’ (The Works of George Berkeley Bishop of Cloyne, eds. Arthur Aston Luce and Thomas Edmund Jessop, vol. 7 (London: Nelson, 1955), 373, l. 21). As cited it may also refer to the title, likewise drawn from Berkeley, inscribed on an 1861 mural by Emanuel Leutze that decorates the United States House of Representatives. Cf. Ernst Benz, ‘Ost und West in der christlichen Geschichtsanschauung’, Die Welt als Geschichte 1 (1935): 488–513 (503–13), who similarly links Hugh and Otto with the work of Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling (d. 1817).

¹⁶ Roger D. Ray, ‘Medieval Historiography through the Twelfth Century: Problems and Progress of Research’, Viator 5 (1974): 33–59 (33–5); Hans-Werner Goetz, Geschichtsschreibung und Geschichtsbewußtsein im hohen Mittelalter, 2nd ed. Orbis mediaevalis 1 (Berlin: Akademie, 2008), 32–34.

¹⁷ Herbert Grundmann, Geschichtsschreibung im Mittelalter: Gattungen – Epochen – Eigenart, 3rd ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978), 21–22, cf. 73. See also Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), 237–8; Goez, Translatio Imperii, 107; Horst Dieter Rauh, Das Bild des Antichrist im Mittelalter: Von Tychonius zum deutschen Symbolismus, 2nd ed. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters, Neue Folge 9 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1979), 305. Cf. the more recent qualifications by Goetz, Geschichtsbild, 315–27 and Lehtonen, ‘History, Tragedy and Fortune’, 33.

¹⁸ Chenu, Nature, Man and Society, 169; Southern, ‘Hugh of Saint Victor’, 165–67; cf. Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1964), 89–90.

¹⁹ Chenu, Nature, Man and Society, 186.

²⁰ A.J. Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture, trans. G. L. Campbell (London: Routledge, 1985), 131; Goetz, Geschichtsbild, 158 n. 132.

²¹ ‘Ordo autem loci et ordo temporis fere per omnia secundum rerum gestarum seriem concurrere uidentur. Et ita per diuinam prouidentiam uidetur esse dispositum, ut que in principio temporum gerebantur, in oriente – quasi in principio mundi – gererentur, ac deinde ad finem profluente tempore usque ad occidentem rerum summa descenderet, ut ex hoc ipso agnoscamus appropinquare finem seculi, quia rerum cursus iam attigit finem mundi. Ideo primus homo in oriente in hortis Eden conditus collocatur ut ab illo principio propago posteritatis in orbem terrarum proflueret. Item post diluuium principium regnorum et caput mundi in Assyriis et Chaldeis et Medis in partibus orientis fuit, deinde ad Grecos uenit; postremo circa finem seculi ad Romanos in occidente – quasi in fine mundi habitantes – potestas summa descendit.’ Hugh of Saint Victor, De archa Noe 4.9, ed. Patrice Sicard. CCCM 176 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), 111–12. On the coordinate use of mundus and saeculum, see Chenu, Nature, Man and Society, 170 n. 19.

²² On their contemplative function, see Paul Rorem, Hugh of Saint Victor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 130–43. Hugh of Saint Victor, De archa 4.9, ed. Sicard, 111–13; Hugh of Saint Victor, Libellus de formatione arche 11, ed. Patrice Sicard. CCCM 176A (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), 157; Hugh of Saint Victor, De uantitate rerum mundanarum 2, ed. Cédric Giraud. CCCM 269 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 168.

²³ On the Chronica see Goez, Translatio, 120–21 and Joachim Ehlers, Hugo von St. Viktor: Studien zum Geschichtsdenken und zur Geschichtsschreibung des 12 Jahrhunderts. Frankfurter historische Abhandlungen 7 (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1973), 128. On the Descriptio, see Nathalie Bouloux, ‘The Munich Map (c. 1130): Description, Meanings and Uses’, in A Critical Companion to English Mappae Mundi of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, eds. Dan Terkla and Nick Millea. Boydell Studies in Medieval Art and Architecture 17 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2019), 104–5.

²⁴ Boyd Taylor Coolman, The Theology of Hugh of St. Victor: An Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 163–91; Conrad Rudolph, The Mystic Ark: Hugh of Saint Victor, Art, and Thought in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 62–63, 191–203.

²⁵ Hugh of Saint Victor, De uanitate 2, ed. Giraud, 168: ‘Incipientibus ergo nobis ab origine rerum omnium et per opera restaurationis secundum longitudinem archae decurrentibus ad finem et consummationem uniuersorum …  (My emphasis.)’. See also Hugh of Saint Victor, De archa 4.9, ed. Sicard, 111. On the technical meaning of ‘opera restaurationis’: Hugh of Saint Victor, De sacramentis Christianae fidei 1.prol.2–3, ed. J.-P. Migne. PL 176 (Paris: Garnier, 1880), 185–86 and Hugh of Saint Victor, De scripturis et Scriptoribus sacris 2, ed. J.-P. Migne. PL 175 (Paris: Garnier, 1879), 11; see Coolman, Theology, 12–13, 126–27.

²⁶ Otto of Freising, Chronica 1.prol., ed. Hofmeister, 7–8, trans. Mierow, 94; Mégier, ‘Tamquam lux’, 145–46; Hans-Werner Goetz, ‘Entzeiterwartung und Endzeitvorstellung im Rahmen des Geschichtsbildes des früheren 12. Jahrhunderts’, in The Use and Abuse of Eschatology in the Middle Ages, eds. Werner Verbeke, Daniel Verhelst and Andries Welkenhuysen. Mediaevalia Lovaniensia 15 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1988), 306–32 (330 n. 134).

²⁷ Otto of Freising, Chronica 1.prol., cf. 5.36, ed. Hofmeister, 8, 260, trans. Mierow, 95, 358. On the theme of mutabilitas, see Goetz, Geschichtsbild, 86–94, 122–4.

²⁸ Otto of Freising, Chronica 5.prol., ed. Hofmeister, 227–8, trans. Mierow, 323.

²⁹ Cf. Bede, Chronica 68–71, ed. Theodor Mommsen. MGH Auctores antiquissimi 13 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1898), 322–27; Classen, ‘Res Gestae’, 403.

³⁰ Classen, ‘Res Gestae’, 402; Goetz, Geschichtsscreibung, 190–92; Goez, Translatio, 121.

³¹ Orosius, Historiae 6.21.19–21.

³² Otto of Freising, Chronica 3.4, ed. Hofmeister, 140, trans. Mierow, 228.

³³ Otto of Freising, Chronica 7.32, ed. Hofmeister, 360–63, trans. Mierow, 441–42.

³⁴ Goetz, Geschichtsbild, 160–61; Mégier, ‘Tamquam lux’, 150; Hugh of Saint Victor, De archa 4.8–9, ed. Sicard, 105–17; Otto of Freising, Chronica 1.prol., ed. Hofmeister, 8.

³⁵ While some scholars remain circumspect about Otto’s dependence on Hugh (e.g. Goetz, Geschichtsbild, 158 n. 132), most take it for granted (e.g. Rauh, Antichrist, 342 and Rudolph, Mystic Ark, 203).

³⁶ Ehlers, Otto von Freising, 39–40, 67–83; Goetz, Geschichtsbild, 39–40. On dating the Ark tracts: Rudolph, Mystic Ark, 43; Dan Terkla, ‘Hugh of St Victor (1096–1141) and Anglo-French Cartography’, Imago Mundi 65, no. 2 (2013): 163, 172–3 n. 18.

³⁷ Ehlers, Otto von Freising, 147.

³⁸ Urkunden des Cistercienser-Stiftes Heiligenkreuz im Wiener Walde, ed. Johann Nepomuk Weis. Fontes rerum Austriacarum 11. 2 vols. (Vienne: Kaiserlich-Königlichen Hof- und Staatsdruckeri, 1856), 1:1.

³⁹ Heiligenkreuz, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. 105 and Cod. 205, fol. IIr; Theodor Gottlieb, Mittelalterliche Bibliothekskataloge Österreichs, vol. 1, Niederösterreich (Vienne: Holzhausen, 1915), 21. On the dating of Otto’s Chronica: Hofmeister, Preface to Otto of Freising, Chronica, XII–XVI and Ehlers, Otto von Freising, 166–68.

⁴⁰ Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 15692. The entire Austro-Bavarian branch is interlinked with Morimond through its daughter houses: Sicard, Preface to Hugh of Saint Victor, De archa Noe; Libellas de formatione arche, 115* n. 11.

⁴¹ Ehlers, Otto von Freising, 15–21.

⁴² As in Rudolph, Mystical Ark, 203; Ehlers, Hugo von St. Viktor, 134–35 and Goez, Translatio, 120.

⁴³ Besides Orosius, suggestions include: Fulcher of Chartres (Akbari, Idols in the East, 35); Gerald of Wales (Lapina, Warfare, 126–27); Honorius Augustodunensis (Hans-Werner Goetz, ‘The Concept of Time in the Historiography of the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’, in Medieval Concepts of the Past: Ritual, Memory, Historiography, eds. Gerd Althoff, Johannes Fried and Patrick J. Geary. Publications of the German Historical Institute (Washington: German Historical Institute, 2002), 139–66 (154)); Joachim of Fiore (Benz, ‘Ost und West’, 502); Jordanes (Goez, Translatio, 117); Lambert of Saint-Omer (Rubenstein, Nebuchadnezzar, 31, 128–29); Notker the Stammerer (Friedrich Ohly, ‘Typologische Figuren aus Natur und Mythus’, in Formen und Funktionen der Allegorie: Symposion Wolfenbüttel 1978, ed. Walter Haug (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1979), 126–66 (128)) and Severian of Jabala (Wright, Geographic Lore, 234).

⁴⁴ On the very different role of east and west in Augustine’s idea of Rome and Babylon, see Andrew Scheil, Babylon under Western Eyes: A Study of Allusion and Myth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 60–64; Johannes van Oort, Jerusalem and Babylon: A Study into Augustine’s City of God and the Sources of his Doctrine of the Two Cities. Vigiliae Christianae, Supplements 14 (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 168–69; and in Orosius: Van Nuffelen, Orosius, 49–51; Kempshall, Rhetoric, 70.

⁴⁵ Barbara Maurmann, Die Himmelsrichtungen im Weltbild des Mittelalters: Hildegard von Bingen, Honorius Augustodunensis und andere Autoren. Münstersche Mittelalter-Schriften 33 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1976) remains the most systematic study of the cardinal directions as exegetical categories. Cf. Barbara Obrist, ‘Wind Diagrams and Medieval Cosmology’, Speculum 72, no. 1 (1997): 33–84.

⁴⁶ Wright, Geographical Lore, 234; Chenu, Nature, Man and Society, 186; Alessandro Scafi, ‘Defining Mappaemundi’, in The Hereford World Map: Medieval World Maps and Their Context, ed. P. D. A. Harvey (London: British Library, 2006), 345–54 (347). Cf. Classen, ‘Res Gestae’, 406–7; Southern, ‘Hugh of Saint Victor’, 163–72; Bernard Guenée, Histoire et culture historique dans l'Occident médiéval (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1980), 30–32.

⁴⁷ Hugh of Saint Victor, De sacramentis 1.prol.2, PL 176, 183A–C, trans. Roy J. Deferarri, Hugh of Saint Victor On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1951), 3–4. Cf. Hugh’s characterisations in De archa 4.3–9, ed. Sicard, 92–117; De vanitate 2, ed. Sicard 152–69 and De sacramentis 1.28–29, PL 176, 203D–204D.

⁴⁸ ‘De operibus conditionis per opera restaurationis ad conditionis et restaurationis auctorem ascendunt.’ Hugh of Saint Victor, De archa 4.6, ed. Sicard, 102; see also Hugh of Saint Victor, Commentaria in Hierarchiam coelestem S. Dionysii Areopagitae 1.1, ed. J.-P. Migne. PL 175 (Paris: Garnier, 1879), 926–28 and Hugh of Saint Victor, Didascalicon 2.1, ed. J.-P. Migne. PL 176 (Paris: Garnier, 1880), 751C; Rorem, Hugh, 139–40 and Rudolph, Mystic Ark, 269–71.

⁴⁹ Hugh of Saint Victor, Didascalicon 5.3, PL 176, 790C–791A; Hugh of Saint Victor, De sacramentis 1.prol.5, PL 176, 185A–B. Cf. Hugh’s qualification in the Descriptio mappe mundi that he will discuss ‘significationes, non quas res ipse significant, sed quibus significantur’ (Hugh of Saint Victor, Descriptio mappe mundi prol., in La 'Descriptio mappe mundi' de Hugues de Saint-Victor: Texte inédit avec introduction et commentaire, ed. Patrick Gautier Dalché (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1988), 133) and Patrick Gautier Dalché, ‘Hic mappa mundi consideranda est: lecture de la mappemonde au Moyen Age’, in Iterari del testo per Stefano Pittalugo, ed. Cristina Cocco, Clara Fossati, Attilio Grisafi, Francesco Mosetti Casaretto and Giada Boiani (Genoa: Ledizioni, 2018), 512–13.

⁵⁰ Hugh of Saint Victor, De archa 4.9, ed. Sicard, 112; Hugh of Saint Victor, Libellus 11, ed. Sicard, 160; Hugh of Saint Victor, De vanitate 2, ed. Giraud, 168. See further Rudolph, Mystic Ark, 156–57, 497–98 n. 425.

⁵¹ Hugh of Saint Victor, De scripturis 16, PL 175, 23B–D; on this work see Rorem, Hugh, 17–21.

⁵² Hugh of Saint Victor, De archa 4.9, ed. Sicard, 112. In De scripturis they are north and south of the desert of Jesus’s temptation (Matt. 4:1–11; Mark 1:12–13; Luke 4:1–13) and in the Libellus they are simply north and south.

⁵³ Orosius, Historiae 1.21; this placement is evident, e.g., on the Cotton Map (London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B.v, fol. 56v), the Tournai map of Palestine (London, British Library, Add. MS 10049, fol. 64v) and the Sawley Map (Cambridge, Corpus Christi, MS 66, p. 2). On the Cotton map, see Peter Barber, ‘Medieval Maps of the World’, in Hereford World Map, ed. Harvey, 4–8; on the Tournai maps: P.D.A. Harvey, Medieval Maps of the Holy Land (London: British Library, 2012), 40–59; and on the Sawley map: Alfred Hiatt, ‘The Sawley Map (c. 1190)’, in Companion to English Mappae Mundi, ed. Terkla and Millea, 112–26.

⁵⁴ Hugh of Saint Victor, Descriptio mappe mundi 10, ed. Gautier Dalché, 141–42; Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 10058, fol. 154v. On the Munich map, see Bouloux, ‘The Munich Map’, 92–111.

⁵⁵ On this point I follow Patrick Gautier-Dalché, ‘“Réalité” et “symbole” dans la géographie de Hugues de Saint-Victor’, in Ugo di San Vittore. Atti del XLVII Convegno storico internazionale (Todi, 10–12 ottobre 2010) (Spoleto: Fondazione CISAM, 2011), 359–81. For Hugh, ‘biblical’ potentially encompasses the entire patristic tradition (Didascalicon 4.2, PL 176, 779B–C; cf. De sacramentis 1.prol.7, PL 176, 186D). Despite Jerome’s immense influence on geographies of the Holy Land (Harvey, Maps of the Holy Land, 6), Hugh seems to be drawing entirely on Augustine here.

⁵⁶ The reference to Babylon is made explicit at 25:9 and the fall of Jerusalem occurs in ch. 39. This passage was also closely linked with Isa. 14:13, e.g. in the Glossa ordinaria (ed. Adolf Rusch, Biblia latina cum glossa ordinaria, 4 vols. (Strasbourg, 1480/81), 3:85v).

⁵⁷ On Egypt: e.g. Augustine, Ennarrationes in Psalmos 77.28, in Ennarrationes in Psalmos LI-C, eds. Eligius Dekkers and Iohannes Fraipont. CCSL 39 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1956), 1088. On Babylon: e.g. Jerome, In Isaiam 6.13.1, in Commentariorum in Esaiam libri I-XI, ed. M. Adriaen. CCSL 73 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1963), 223–24. On Babylon: Rudolph (Mystic Ark, 535 n. 678) suggests Augustine, De ciuitate Dei 16.4 and 17.16 as Hugh’s source. In further support of an Augustinian source, we may note that Hugh alludes to a vetus version of Isa. 14:13 found primarily in Augustine’s Ennarationes (‘ponam sedem meam ad aquilonem’) in both De scripturis 16, PL 175, 23C and De archa 4.9, ed. Sicard, 112. Hugh, however, likely made use of an intermediary source, since Bernard of Clairvaux links this same etymology to the same quotation from Job 10:22 in his Apologia ad Guillelmum 10 (in Bernardi Opera, eds. J. Leclercq and H. M. Rochais, vol. 3 (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1963), 90), just a few years earlier. (On the dating of the Apologia to around 1125 see Conrad Rudolph, The ‘Things of Greater Importance’: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Apologia and the Medieval Attitude Toward Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 203–26.)

⁵⁸ ‘[mundum] in … calore carnalis concupiscentie positum’; ‘infernum, ubi … sempiternus horror inhabitans.’ Hugh of Saint Victor, De archa 4.9, ed. Sicard, 112. On the association of hell with cold and the north, see Vegard Skånland, ‘Calor fidei’, Symbolae Osloenses 32, no. 1 (1956): 86–104 and Alfred L. Kellogg, ‘Satan, Langland, and the North’, Speculum 24, no. 3 (1949): 413–14.

⁵⁹ Maurmann, Himmelsrichtungen, 117–28; see also Skånland, ‘Calor fidei’, 87 and Kellogg, ‘Satan’, 413.

⁶⁰ Maurman, Himmelsrichtungen, 123 n. 27; Bede, In Cantica canticorum libri VI 3.4, in Opera exegetica, vol. 2B, ed. D. Hurst. CCSL 119B (Turnhout: Brepols, 1983), 270–1.

⁶¹ E.g. Origen, In Numeros homilia 27.2, in Origenes Werke, vol. 7/2, Homilien zum Hexateuch in Rufins Übersetzungen, ed. Wilhelm Adolf Baehrens (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1921), 259; Rudolph, Mystic Ark, 535 n. 678

⁶² ‘in oriente – quasi in principio mundi’. Hugh of Saint Victor, De archa 4.9, ed. Sicard, 111 and Hugh of Saint Victor, De vanitate 2 ed. Giraud, 168; see also Hugh of Saint Victor, Libellus, ed. Sicard, 157.

⁶³ See Augustine, De doctrina Christiana 3.36.52, ed. Joseph Martin. CCSL 32 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1962), 112 and De Genesi ad litteram 6.3, ed. Joseph Zycha. CSEL 28/1 (Vienna: Tempsky, 1894), 173. These two readings reflect the difference between the Hebrew text, followed in the Vulgate, and the Septuagint, followed in the vetus text.

⁶⁴ Bede, In Genesis 1.2.8, in Opera Exegetica, vol. 1, ed. Ch. W. Jones. CCSL 118A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1967), 46; Glossa Ordinaria, ed. Rusch, 1:11r; Andrew of Saint Victor, Expositio super heptateuchum, In Genesim 2.8, eds. Charles Lohr and Rainer Brendt. CCCM 53 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1986), 29; Peter Lombard, Sententiae in iu libris dinstinctae 2.17.5.4, ed. PP. Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 2 vols. (Grottaferrata: Colegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas, 1971–81), 1/2:414. See Lesley Smith, The Glossa Ordinaria: The Making of a Medieval Bible Commentary. Commentaria 3 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 149–53, 200–04, 208–09.

⁶⁵ Hugh of Saint Victor, De archa 4.9, ed. Sicard, 112 and De vanitate 2, ed. Giraud, 168.

⁶⁶ Maurmann, Himmelsrichtungen, 201.

⁶⁷ ‘Cum autem iam sol erat ad occasum, flamma facta est, et ecce fornax fumabunda et lampades ignis … ’Augustine, De ciuitate Dei 14.24, ed. Dombart and Kalb, 2:528.

⁶⁸ ‘Sicut enim adflictio ciuitatis Dei … sub antichristo … significatur tenebroso timore Abrahae circa solis occasum, id est propinquante iam fine saeculi: sic ad solis occasum, id est ad ipsum iam finem, significatur isto igne dies iudicii’. (My emphasis.) Augustine, De ciuitate Dei 14.24, ed. Dombart and Kalb, 2:528; I have adapted the translation of R. W. Dyson, The City of God against the Pagans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 734. Cf. Hugh of Saint Victor, De archa 4.9, ed. Sicard, 111: ‘ad finem profluente tempore usque ad occidentem rerum summa descenderet, ut ex hoc ipso agnoscamus appropinquare finem seculi’. (My emphasis.)

⁶⁹ See above n. 43.

⁷⁰ Wright, Geographical Lore, 234. This argument is adopted by Glacken, Traces, 277 and Lapina, Warfare, 128.

⁷¹ Severian of Gabala, Homilies on Creation and Fall 5, trans. Robert C. Hill, in Commentaries on Genesis 1–3: Severian of Gabala and Bede the Venerable, ed. Michael Glerup (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press 2010), 67; cf. Wright, Geographical Lore, 234.

⁷² Maurmann, Himmelsrichtungen, 153–4.

⁷³ Severian of Gabala, On Creation 5, trans. Hill, 67.

⁷⁴ Maurmann, Himmelsrichtungen, 135–82. For an extra-exegetical application of this idea see Bernardus Silvestris(?), Commentum in Martianum 3, in The Commentary on Martianus Capella’s De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii Attributed to Bernardus Silvestris, ed. Haijo Jan Westra. Studies and Texts 80 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1986), 58.

⁷⁵ Maurmann, Himmelsrichtungen, 153 and Jürgen Fischer, Oriens–Occidens–Europa: Begriff und Gedanke ‘Europa’ in der späten Antike und im frühen Mittelalter. Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für europäische Geschichte Mainz Abteilung Universalgeschichte 15 (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1957), 73.

⁷⁶ ‘Christus enim pleno maiestatis suae lumine reuelabitur et, sicut fulgur exit ab oriente et toto lumen suum usque in occidentem orbe diffundit, sic et filius cum suis angelis ueniens inluminabit hunc mundum, ut credat omnis homo et salua fiat omnis caro.’ Ambrose, Explanatio Psalmorum XII Ps. 43.7, in Sancti Ambrosii Opera, vol. 6, ed. M. Petschenig. CSEL 64 (Vienna: Tempsky, 1919), 264; cf. Matt. 24:22–27. The link to the sol iustitiae is made explicit in the preceding chapter (ed. Petschenig, 263–64). See also Maurmann, Himmselsrichtungen, 157.’

⁷⁷ ‘Aeternus sol longe clarius matutino sole a uestro oriente nostri occidentis tenebras illustrauit’. Peter the Venerable, Epistula 83, in The Letters of Peter the Venerable, ed. Giles Constable, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 1:202.

⁷⁸ Lapina, Warfare, 131–32.

⁷⁹ Fischer, Oriens–Occidens, 73–74.

⁸⁰ Sigebert of Gembloux, Vita altera sancti Lamberti 3.31, ed. J.-P. Migne. PL 160 (Paris: Garnier, 1880), 795B–C; on the Vitae sancti Lamberti, see Mireille Chazan, L’Empire et l’histoire universelle: De Sigebert de Gambloux à Jean de Saint-Victor (XIIe-XIVe siècle). Etudes d'histoire médiévale 3 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1999), 75–80.

⁸¹ See Klaus Oschema, Bilder von Europa im Mittelalter. Mittelalter-Forschungen 43 (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2013), 186–91.

⁸² ‘Quasi radius ab occidente emergens orbem universum illustravit’. Benedict of Peterborough, Miracula sancti Thomae Cantuariensis 6.4, in Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, ed. James Craigie Robertson. Rolls Series 67. 7 vols. (London: Longman, 1875–1885), 2:268, discussed by Oschema, Bilder, 189.

⁸³ William FitzStephen, Vita sancti Thomae 158, in History of Thomas Becket, ed. Robertson, 3:154; see Katherine L. Hodges-Kluck, ‘Canterbury and Jerusalem, England and the Holy Land, c. 1150–1220’, Viator 49, no. 1 (2018): 153–77 (158–59) and Oschema, Bilder, 190.

⁸⁴ Oschema, Bilder, 191.

⁸⁵ On prophecy in Gerald, see Victoria Flood, Prophecy Politics and Place in Medieval England: From Geoffrey of Monmouth to Thomas of Erceldoune (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2016), 43–58; on the Prophecies of Merlin Silvester see Victoria Flood, ‘Prophecy as History: A New Study of the Prophecies of Merlin Silvester’, Neophilologus 102, no. 4 (2018): 543–59.

⁸⁶ Gerald of Wales, Expugnatio Hibernica 1, in Expugnatio Hibernica: The Conquest of Ireland, ed. and trans. A. B. Scott and F. X. Martin. New History of Ireland 3 (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1978), 74–5.

⁸⁷ Robert Bartlett, Gerald of Wales: A Voice of the Middle Ages (Stroud: Tempus, 2006), 32.

⁸⁸ ‘Quem naturarum dispositor deus, qui quarta die mundanae creationis solem ab oriente produxit, in sexta aetate seculi nouum solem ab occidente ad inluminationem totius orbis direxit.’ Notker Balbulus, Notatio de illustribus uiris, ed. Erwin Rauner, ‘Notkers des Stammlers “Notatio de illustribus uiris”: Teil I: Kritische Edition’, Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 21 (1986): 34–69 (60).

⁸⁹ As Rudolph (Mystic Ark, 201) rightly argues.

⁹⁰ For recent surveys on Honorius’s life see Karl Kinsella, ‘Edifice and Education: Thought in Twelfth-Century Europe’, 2 vols. (PhD diss., University of Oxford, 2016), 1:214–18 and Fabian Schwarzbauer, Geschichtszeit: Über Zeitvorstellungen in den Universalchroniken Frutolfs von Michelsberg, Honorius’ Augustodunensis und Ottos von Freising. Orbis mediaevalis 6 (Berlin: Akademie, 2005), 40–42.

⁹¹ ‘Veluti si funis ab oriente in occidentem extenderetur qui cottidie plicando collectus, tandem totus absumeretur.’ Honorius Augustodunensis, Imago mundi 2.3, ed. Valerie Flint, ‘Honorius Augustodunensis Imago Mundi’, Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge 57 (1982): 7–153 (92).

⁹² Kinsella, ‘Edifice and Education’, 1:227–28; Honorius Augustodunensis, Speculum ecclesiae, ed. J.-P. Migne. PL 172 (Paris: Garnier, 1895), 964C.

⁹³ Christian Gellinek, ‘Daniel’s Vision of Four Beasts in Twelfth-Century German Literature’, Germanic Review 41, no. 1 (1966): 5–26 (21 n. 68); Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias 3.11.7, ed. Adelgundis Führkötter and Angela Carlevaris. CCSM 43–43A. 2 vols. (Turnhout: Brepols, 1978), 2:580.

⁹⁴ ‘Haec caduca tempora cum occidente sole cadunt.’ Hildegard, Scivias 3.11.6, ed. Führkötter and Carlevaris, 2:580; see Maurmann, Himmelsrichtungen, 86–87.

⁹⁵ Schwarzbauer, Geschichtszeit, 53.

⁹⁶ Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae 3.42.2, 13.1.4.

⁹⁷ Munich Computus 1, in The Munich Computus: Irish Computistics between Isidore of Seville and the Venerable Bede and its Reception in Carolingian Times, ed. and trans. Immo Warntjes. Sudhoffs Archiv 59 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2010), 2–3. Flint also highlights the Munich Computus (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 14456) as a source for Imago mundi 2.3 (Flint, ‘Imago mundi’, 92 n. 3).

⁹⁸ Flint, ‘Imago Mundi’, 35–41; Schwarzbauer, Geschichtszeit, 46.

⁹⁹ As Schwarzbauer rightly suggests (Geschichtszeit, 53 n. 5).

¹⁰⁰ Charles Burnett, Hermann of Carinthia De Essentiis: A Critical Edition with Translation and Commentary. Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters 15 (Leiden: Brill, 1982), 3–10 and Charles Burnett, ‘Arabic into Latin in Twelfth Century Spain: The Works of Hermann of Carinthia’, Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 13 (1978): 100–34.

¹⁰¹ Hermann, De essentiis 2, 78vB–C, ed. and trans. Burnett, 222–23; cf. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae 14.6.8. Hermann’s association of Paradise with the west is unusual, though not unheard of. The most influential example for the Middle Ages was the Voyage of Saint Brendan. (Navigatio sancti Brendani 1.14, ed. Giovanni Orlandi and Rossana E. Guglielmetti. Per Verba 30 (Florence: Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2014), 4.) See Loren Baritz, ‘The Idea of the West’, The American Historical Review 66, no. 3 (1961): 618–40 (621–24) and Katja Weidner, Navigatio sancti Brendani: Die Seereise des heiligen Brendan. Fontes Christiani 94 (Freiburg: Herder, 2022), 30–32.

¹⁰² ‘rerum seriem ab oriente … orsam, paulatim in orbem progressam’ (My emphasis.). Hermann, De essentiis 2, 78vD–E, ed. and trans. Burnett, 224–25.

¹⁰³ Burnett, Hermann of Carinthia, 338, citing Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society, 168–69, 185–88; cf. Hugh of Saint Victor, De archa 4.9, ed. Sicard, 112: ‘ita serie rerum ab oriente in occidente recta linea decurrente’. (My emphasis.)

¹⁰⁴ Worstbrock, ‘Translatio artium’, 1–15, on Hugh: 14–15, though Hugh does not describe it as ‘eastern’ (Hugh of Saint Victor, Didascalicon 3.2, PL 176, 765–67).

¹⁰⁵ On the ‘School of Chartres’, see most recently Édouard Jeauneau, Rethinking the School of Chartres, trans. Claude Paul Desmarais (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 17–27. Bernardus Silvestris dedicates the Cosmographia to Thierry of Chartres. On Hermann’s connections see Burnett, Hermann of Carinthia, 20–25.

¹⁰⁶ Jeauneau, School of Chartres, 43–55.

¹⁰⁷ On the Dragmaticon, see Kathrin Müller, Visuelle Weltaneignung: Astronomische und kosmologische Diagramme in Handschriften des Mittelalters. Historische Semantik 11 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), 93–181.

¹⁰⁸ ‘Ex quodam uero limo, in quo qualitates elementorum aequaliter conuenerant, hominis corpus in orientali regione est factum: est enim ceteris regionibus temperatior.’ William of Conches, Dragmaticon philosophiae 3.4.3–4, ed. I. Ronca. CCCM 152 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997), 66; the limus is of Gen. 2:7, cf. Hermann, De essentiis 2, 78vF, ed. and trans. Burnett, 224–25.

¹⁰⁹ ‘magni … anni’; ‘Vnde credimus finem mundi instare, quia quantitates corporum imminutas, uitas abbreuiatas uidemus … Et quemadmodum incipiente nouo anno uidemus ea quae mortua sunt reuiuiscere, sic in principio sequentis saeculi qui mortui sunt reuiuiscere poterunt’. William of Conches, Dragmaticon 3.4.6–7, ed. Ronca, 67. On the idea of the magnus annus see Macrobius, Commentarii in somnio Scipionis 2.11, ed. Jacob Willis (Leipzig: Teubner, 1994), 127–30.

¹¹⁰ William of Conches, Dragmaticon 3.4.8–10, ed. Ronca, 68–69.

¹¹¹ On Bernardus’s account of creation and its link with William of Conches, I follow Mark Kauntze, Authority and Imitation: A Study of the “Cosmographia” of Bernard Silvestris. Mittellateinische Studien und Texte 47 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 106–19.

¹¹² Winthrop Wetherbee, ed. and trans., Bernardus Silvestris: Poetic Works. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 38 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), VII–XII.

¹¹³ Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia micr.9.3, cf. meg.3.337–8, ed. and trans. Wetherbee, 132–33, 54–55. See generally Brian Stock, Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century: A Study of Bernard Silvester (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 187–226.

¹¹⁴ Bernardus, Cosmographia micr.9.3, ed. and trans. Wetherbee, 132–3: ‘haec ver habet perpetuum’. See Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. William R. Trask (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), 183–202.

¹¹⁵ Bernardus, Cosmographia meg.3.319–20, ed. and trans. Wetherbee, 52–53.

¹¹⁶ See Wetherbee’s note on meg.3.317–36 in Poetic Works, 281 and Stock, Myth and Science, 191.

¹¹⁷ Bernardus, Cosmographia meg.3.335–36, ed. and trans. Wetherbee, 52–53; see also Stock, Myth and Science, 136–37.

¹¹⁸ Bernardus, Cosmographia micr.11.9, ed. and trans. Wetherbee, 148–49.

¹¹⁹ Rudolph, Mystic Ark, 201; Mégier, ‘Tamquam lux’, 131.

¹²⁰ Akbari emphasises the twelfth century as the point of change in representations of the east (Idols in the East, 15, 20–66).

¹²¹ Lapina, Warfare, 122–42. For a salient caution against overstating the significance of Islam in the Latin consciousness, see Nicholas Morton, Encountering Islam on the First Crusade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 234–69.

¹²² Akbari, Idols in the East, 35–50; Baumgärtner, ‘Winds and Continents’, 23–72.

¹²³ Gassman, ‘Translatio Studii’, 762–63, 168–71, 415–27; so also Fenzi, ‘Translatio Studii’, 194–98.

¹²⁴ J.H. Elliot, Spain, Europe and the Wider World, 1500–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 135–37; Baritz, ‘Idea of the West’, 637–40; Georgios Varouxakis, ‘The Godfather of “Occidentality”: Auguste Comte and the Idea of “The West”’, Modern Intellectual History 16, no. 2 (2019): 411–41 (418–19); Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 105–06; Alastair Bonnett, The Idea of the West: Culture, Politics and History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 24.