ABSTRACT
Maps based on the early medieval models were still being produced and copied in England all the way into the sixteenth century. When the fourteenth-century Polychronicon of Ranulf Higden was translated into English by Caxton in 1480, it contained a mappa mundi compiled not from geographical experience but from a host of ancient sources that continued to reflect a staunchly medieval conception of the world. In the Dig by Mary Magdalena we find perhaps the first attempt to represent a new kind of geographical imagination in a traditionally spiritual and dramatic form, offering an implied distinction between the World as sinful and the World as the location of human spiritual accomplishments. While Mary's pilgrimage evokes the heavenly purpose of the voyage, it also highlights, through its representational form, the vast distances and geographical nature of the journey.
