One of several intriguing features of MS 274 is the map of the world that appears prior to the manuscript’s copy of the first nineteen books of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History. It was clearly designed to express the Aristotelian theory that only the known world, comprising Asia, Europe, and Africa, protruded above the ocean, in opposition to theories that proposed the possibility of antipodal lands beyond and beneath the known world.

World map in a 12th-century English manuscript of Macrobius’s Commentary on the Dream of Scipio
Trinity College Library, Cambridge, MS R.9.23, f. 60v [detail]
© The Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge

Trinity College Library, Cambridge