A Jewish Look on World Politics: The Catalan Mappamundi (1375)

Prof Katrin Kogman-Appel

(University of Münster, Germany) 

6.30pm, 1 November 2018   

The richly illustrated Catalan Mappamundi is among the most celebrated medieval maps surviving to this day. Commissioned by Peter IV of Aragon as a gift to Charles V of France it was put to parchment by Elisha Cresques, a Jewish scribe, illuminator, and cartographer in the City of Majorca. The talk explores how Elisha, from his delicate position as a Sefardi intellectual in the service of the Court coped with his patron’s agendas while, at the same time, voiced his own views of the politics of his time.   

Katrin Kogman-Appel holds an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship (2015–2020), which she assumed in Jewish Studies at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität in Münster. She has published work on medieval Jewish art and is particularly interested in Hebrew manuscript illumination and its cultural and social contexts. Publications include A Mahzor from Worms (2012). She recently completed a study on Elisha Cresques ben Abraham, a fourteenth-century Jewish scribe, illuminator, and map maker in Majorca.