ABSTRACT
In Greek and Roman science, the antipodes are the most remote location in relation to where one happens to be, a region inhabited by “those whose feet are opposite ours.” The idea of the antipodes encouraged the ancients to imagine a world larger than their tangible experience and to consider fundamental global qualities such as the earth’s symmetry and habitation. Potential communication with antipodean people further suggested the possibility of circumnavigation. The Middle Ages inherited this ancient scientifi c interest in the antipodes and, in the earlier medieval period, theologians, philosophers, and others compared the ancient texts with passages from the Bible. This additional historical sense complicated ideas about the antipodes because writers attempted to reconcile Biblical depictions of the world with ancient wisdom. Yet it would be a mistake to characterize the entire medieval period’s writings about the antipodes and related imaginings of the globe as a working through of this interpretive tension. After all, Armand Rainaud, in Le continent austral, says of the antipodes that they were “one of the most serious preoccupations of medieval science and theology,” and Alfred Hiatt, in Terra Incognita: Mapping the Antipodes before 1600, has argued that they are not so much an “anti-oecumene” as an “ante-oecumene” that “precedes” the known world, “signifying land itself, the fundamental basis of habitation, and the precondition for cartographic representation.” 1 That is, something much more occurs during the period. Indeed, in the Middle Ages, we fi nd a great variety of ideas about the antipodes, and in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as with so much other knowledge at this moment in history, people revisited and changed global epistemes. These transformations appear in many different kinds of texts: scientifi c and encyclopedic writings and artworks, as well as poetry and prose literature.
