ABSTRACT

The south, as place of bodily transgression in The Castle, is conceptually the same domain as that of the monstrous races of the mappaemundi. Some of the monsters might simply be termed wonders and as such morally neutral in significance, but since the mappaemundi are so charged with spiritual values it seems more likely that a pejorative significance is implied. Terra Australis had been configured in several variants within the Roman world. Two distinctly different Roman models co-existed until the late medieval period: they were the so-called 'T-O' map and the zonal map. Isidore's map is one of those in which the centre is not in Jerusalem, as it came to be in a number of T-O maps, but in the Mediterranean rather than on the mainland. The other two cardinal points are marked on Isidore's map as Septentrio and Meridies, respectively representing north and south.