Imaginary Jerusalem

Elements of the medieval world were far geekier than even today's Lord of the Rings cosplayers, Twilight pilgrims or Star Wars obsessives. The imaginary Jerusalem of Nicholas of Lyra, with its maps and building plans of places that never existed, made the writer's commentary on Ezekiel immensely popular in its day.

A fine 15th-century manuscript of Nicholas's Postillae has just come online at Digita Vaticana and you can feast your eyes on all these drawings. The codex is Urb.lat.15 and among its elaborate drawings is the sanctuary with east and west entrances and the altare holocaust site in the temple at folio 201v:

There's a fine Renaissance palace imagined in Jerusalem at folio 198r

Look through the book and you will find all sorts of oddities. Here's Antiochus II, given the epithet Theos, and his successive wives Laodice and Berenice in a not entirely reliable family tree at folio 259r. Observe how this top-down stemma has got little roots growing at the bottom. Very odd.

The origins of the diagrams are discussed in a 2012 paper by Lesley Smith.

Also new online in the batch of just two items uploaded October 12, 2015 is Borg.copt.65.

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