While a culture may have a dominant way of ‘mapping’, its geography is always plural, not singular, and there is always competition among conceptions of space. Beginning with this understanding, this book traces the map’s early development into an emblem of the state, and charts the social and cultural implications of this phenomenon.Instead of presenting a sequence of medieval mapping metaphors, Daniel Birkholz offers an account of the ways in which medieval cartographic discourse itself produces its artefacts, and so produces cultural meaning. This book chronicles the specific technologies, material and epistemological, by which the map – a peculiar artefact, part image and part treatise – shows itself capable of accessing, organizing and reorienting a tremendous range of information.