Medievalists.net The Ebstorf Map: tradition and contents of a medieval picture of the world the largest medieval map of the world whose original has been lost The Ebstorf Map contains the knowledge of the time of its creation; it can be used for example as an atlas Origin: The original of this mappa mundi from the 13th century AD was discovered around 1830 at the convent of Ebstorf (Germany in the Lüneburger Heide region) and named after it which was first founded as a convent of canons around 1160 and soon after refounded as a convent for Benedictine nuns (Dose Opinions differ not only concerning the exact time or time period of its creation and reproduction: After the rediscovery of the map an unknown hand cut out pieces from the top right-hand corner; parts missing on the left are due to damage done by mice during storage The original consisted of 30 single pieces of sheepskin parchment that had been sewn together and rolled up In 1834 it was taken to the Vaterländisches Archiv in Hanover and later added to the map collection of the Historischer Verein für Niedersachsen there In 1838 the first measures to preserve the map were taken in 1888 at the Königliches Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin it was taken apart Then it was kept in single pieces put into frames in a chest of drawers at the Hauptstaatsarchiv in Hanover Click here to read this article from History of Geo and Space Sciences See also: Ten Beautiful Medieval Maps We've created a Patreon for Medievalists.net as we want to transition to a more community-funded model We aim to be the leading content provider about all things medieval podcast and Youtube page offers news and resources about the Middle Ages We hope that are our audience wants to support us so that we can further develop our podcast and remove the advertising on our platforms This will also allow our fans to get more involved in what content we do produce Member Login This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks The action you just performed triggered the security solution There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page a mapmaker toiled away in the German convent of Ebstorf painting the known world on stitched goat hide and those fanged monsters morphed into new continents These monsters measure their lives in aeons They exist on our maps as unfathomable black stains: here be black holes You could call Kathryn Ross a monster hunter. She studies black holes at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) She is part of a team that found that the supermassive black holes at the heart of galaxies seem to be breaking the laws of physics Some of the 21,000 galaxies they measured were acting strangely The light of 323 galaxies changed too quickly while 51 galaxies were changing colour when they shouldn’t We were checking two datapoints across 2 years for these galaxies We all just looked at it and went oh … OK?” A jet of matter and energy from the galaxy Messier 87 A black hole is surrounded by “a doughnut of hot plasma” called an accretion disk The gravity of a black hole is so powerful that anything caught in its pull would have to travel faster than the speed of light – the speed limit of the universe – to escape it The disk is the white-hot matter being pulled apart by the black hole’s gravity This disk will sometimes shoot powerful jets of matter and energy These jets are constantly fed with matter from the black hole’s disc. Matter shot from these jets whirls through space, creating immense magnetic energy, along with the most powerful gamma rays and X-rays in the known universe This energy travelled across the universe to Earth At the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) hundreds of white antennas stand atop ferric soil “They look like metal spiders sprinkled across the Australian outback They don’t actually look like they’re doing anything But these antennas are passively picking up the radio signals from the jets’ whirling Kathryn showing off ICRAR’s radio antennas in the WA outback That data runs along a 700km fibre optic line to Pawsey Supercomputing Centre it’s translated into colours we can see mapped to the strength of the radiation and its wavelength at each point in the sky It’s a computer the size of a room doing paint-by-numbers This map is called GLEAM and it shows some galaxies changing wildly – faster than should be possible under the known laws of physics This is how Kathryn caught the black holes misbehaving the enormous mushroom structures far from the jet’s core “They’re so big you shouldn’t see anything changing We predicted these images to be very calm – but some of them weren’t.” Astronomers try to make sense of a universe that we still know very little about all the radio waves we collect from galaxies are so low energy it’s equivalent to a handful of rocks falling to the ground,” says Kathryn And the distances between galaxies are so huge we can’t just go over and check when something’s acting strange Even the most powerful creature in the universe – a supermassive black hole – has to play by the rules how could these galaxies be sparkling so rapidly Kathryn and her colleagues at ICRAR came up with three possibilities First, by pure luck, we’ve caught a bunch of black holes as they’re burping – releasing several solar systems worth of matter and energy at once it’s possible that the radio waves from these jets are scintillating as they hit huge gas clouds somewhere between us and them This is the same physics that makes stars twinkle when gases from our atmosphere pass between us and the star’s light Or third, Earth is being hit by a blazar meaning the black hole’s jet is targeted directly at us neutron star jets have been recorded varying wildly in colour and brightness These black hole jets could be doing something similar on a scale over a billion times larger “As a scientist you’ve got your hunches,” Kathryn said “My two favourites are scintillation and blazars “The problem is with the galaxies that change colour Scintillation changes brightness but not colour “We’re looking right down the barrel of the gun of these jets and we’ve seen similar changes on smaller scales with binary system black holes.” A visualisation of the data from the GLEAM survey this journey didn’t start with “Eureka!” but with “That’s weird …” The discovery of these twinkling black holes might have been an accident Kathryn’s collecting data to figure out which possible answer is the real thing warp space and test the limits of known physics The centre of their insatiable maws are still dark spots for humanity places we can never go and may never fully understand So these great beasts continue to stalk the edges of our maps: here be black holes Get the latest WA science news delivered to your inbox We want our stories to be shared and seen by as many people as possible Therefore, unless it says otherwise, copyright on the stories on Particle belongs to Scitech and they are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License This allows you to republish our articles online or in print for free and you can’t edit our material or sell it separately Using the ‘republish’ button on our website is the easiest way to meet our guidelines You have to credit Particle with a link back to the original publication on Particle link to us and include links from our story Our page view counter is a small pixel-ping (invisible to the eye) that allows us to know when our content is republished It’s a condition of our guidelines that you include our counter If you use the ‘republish’ then you’ll capture our page counter If you’re republishing in print, please email us to let us so we know about it (we get very proud to see our work republished) and you must include the Particle logo next to the credits. 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Read the original article engaged in regular and vibrant conversation about vocation Lisa works to make medieval spirituality relevant to life in the twenty-first century through her writing and speaking to church groups and communities interested in how to make sense of the intersections in their own lives Lisa’s new book, A World Transformed: Exploring the Spirituality of Medieval Maps and I asked her to share a bit from it with us here It seemed so risqué to imagine Mary Magdalene mothering Jesus’ child The book amused me not because Brown went too far but because in his pursuit of the “sacred feminine,” he didn’t go far enough According to medieval thinkers (and the Bible itself) Jesus didn’t need a spouse to further his bloodline In this excerpt from my recent book, A World Transformed: Exploring the Spirituality of Medieval Maps I explore the medieval tradition of Jesus as mother via the Ebstorf Map Jesus does not just hold the world; he embodies it from which his extremities (somewhat awkwardly) protrude The map is actually a full-length portrait of our Lord The Ebstorf Map gives us a way to understand divine creativity Jesus’ body contains the world but also swells with the world To my mind—and I believe this was the intention of its makers—the Ebstorf Map pictures a pregnant body It completely subsumes the normal proportions of the human form And at the center of this pregnant body lies Jerusalem Of all the names and concepts for Jerusalem that we’ve examined in this book—geographical center heavenly city—I find “navel” the most evocative “navel” simply means “center.” But of course it also carries connotations of gestation and birth It describes wonderfully the place of Christ’s death and resurrection much as the umbilical cord carries sustenance to a new human being through the site of the navel The city of Jerusalem signifies that our earth is forever linked to the one who carried it and brought it forth the navel gives us a new and perhaps a challenging image of our Lord We think of God as our father and Jesus himself as our friend and brother one that delivers nourishment through the earth’s navel the Ebstorf Map presents Jesus as mother—a mother to the world The map may have been made by the nuns in the Benedictine convent in which it was displayed Yet its theology does not spring from a “female mind.” In the Middle Ages men of the church also thought of Jesus as a mother so foreign to the way we address Jesus today was quite widespread at the time the Ebstorf Map was made Male religious leaders frequently sought to imitate the savior’s feminine side Authority figures such as abbots and prelates saw in Jesus the nurturing and protective qualities they needed in their role as caretakers the twelfth-century Cistercian abbot Aelred of Rievaulx told his monks that I long after you all in the bowels of Jesus Christ.” [1] Yet Jesus’ motherhood consisted of more than a set of admirable qualities; it was also physical Abbots and monks thought about Jesus’ body and the maternal nourishment it could provide On your altar let it be enough for you to have a representation of our Savior hanging on the cross; that will bring before your mind his Passion for you to imitate his outspread arms will invite you to embrace him his naked breasts will feed you with the milk of sweetness to console you The followers of Christ were to nurse from these breasts and so receive spiritual food The Ebstorf Map represents the culmination of the medieval conception of Jesus as mother he does something even more maternal: he gives birth sometimes uncomfortable way of thinking about the far-reaching compassion of Jesus Our savior nurtures us with a body that is neither male nor female; it is both including parts we didn’t even know he had!” Read the rest of this story, including the biblical basis for Jesus as mother, in A World Transformed: Exploring the Spirituality of Medieval Maps (Cascade 2015) Ebstorf Map image by User: Kolossos (own work, related to the stiching) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons