England's curious map of the medieval world | Hacker News Reader

England's curious map of the medieval world

bbc.com

59 pointsMiriamWeiner24 comments

Interesting video re: Mappa Mundi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4uHbTtWbe8

The whole channel is pretty good if you're interested in medieval life

Medieval maps are very interesting, partly because they are noticeably worse than the best Roman maps of 1000+ years ago. I assume because of the collapse of Roman trade. Northern European maps would have relied much more on hearsay, and setting fixed travel waypoints over accurate distances.

Fascinating content, but I really dislike the way the BBC has made this. Apart from the obvious problems of using a photo gallery to tell a textual story, it's not even providing pictures that are contextual to the texts.

I feel almost robbed of context.

Here's a link to the actual map: https://www.themappamundi.co.uk/mappa-mundi/

Yeah, agreed, this trend has got to go. Unusable. I immediately closed the tab. When not even reader mode helps, you've lost me.

So I see your link, and I raise you this link to just a normal JPG:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Hereford...

Thanks! I can understand why they feel the need to present the map with extensive commentary immediately alongside. The writing is almost impossible to read, and the drawings are difficult to interpret by a layman without help. But it's baffling that they don't even include a link to a bare image.

> I immediately closed the tab

I didn't even open the BBC article in the first place but only the HN discussion. The bbc.com domain has joined my list of websites that are not worth visiting. Basically junk.

Agreed. I made a comment about this about another article a few weeks back that went too heavy on the visual story telling. Yes, it's cool that it looks like a magazine and all, but very difficult to focus on and hold the narrative.

Second, thanks for the link to the map! Maybe I missed it for the aforementioned issues, but I rather expected an article about a map to contain the actual map.

Wow that's a really bad map.

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