Men Who Wear Glasses

The Life of Francesco I del Rovere is a biography with a series of extraordinary illuminations depicting 16th-century court life in Italy.

Francesco Maria di Montefeltro was the fourth duke of Urbino and his life ended up being celebrated in word by Giovanni Battista Leoni and in images by Valerio Mariani da Pesaro. The manuscript, Urb.lat.1764, part of the Urbino Collection, was brought online on August 31 by the Vatican Library.

You can enjoy each of the images for a long time, and ask your own questions. Here's somebody standing behind the pope who is wearing natty black-rimmed spectacles. Explain that.

In 1524, Francesco paid a state visit to Venice and was met by the then Doge, Andrea Gritti, in the Piazzetta San Marco. Naturally there was a big procession for him:

But what caught my eye was the commerce at the fringe. Even in those days, there were jerrybuilt wooden shops on the main square of Venice selling heaven knows what to the tourists:

Enjoy browsing the manuscript. It is one of 39 just brought online for a new posted total of 5,353.  Here is my unofficial list:

1. Reg.lat.1701, a fine miscellany from the 11th century. Among the contents is a glossary of Old High German with definitions in Latin. Below is the incipit of the Ars Poetica of Horace:
   
2. Urb.lat.1764, discussed above
3. Vat.ebr.4
4. Vat.ebr.40
5. Vat.ebr.41
6. Vat.ebr.42
7. Vat.ebr.344
8. Vat.ebr.356
9. Vat.ebr.390
10. Vat.ebr.391
11. Vat.ebr.392
12. Vat.ebr.393
13. Vat.ebr.394
14. Vat.ebr.395
15. Vat.ebr.397
16. Vat.ebr.398
17. Vat.ebr.404
18. Vat.ebr.409
19. Vat.ebr.410
20. Vat.ebr.412.pt.3
21. Vat.ebr.413
22. Vat.ebr.420
23. Vat.ebr.423
24. Vat.lat.181
25. Vat.lat.329
26. Vat.lat.360
27. Vat.lat.368
28. Vat.lat.783
29. Vat.lat.873
30. Vat.lat.878
31. Vat.lat.888
32. Vat.lat.898
33. Vat.lat.935
34. Vat.lat.953
35. Vat.lat.959
36. Vat.lat.969
37. Vat.lat.987
38. Vat.lat.8552, Josephus, The Antiquities of the Jews, in Latin: check out the Latin Josephus Project for more information. This manuscript is discussed in a 1960 codicology book by Jacques Stiennon on millennial manuscripts from the Lieges area, reviewed in Scriptorium.
39. Vat.turc.152

The Bibliotheca Palatina project is separately pouring on the power, and has brought the following 67 Pal.lat. manuscripts held by the Vatican online in recent weeks. The list includes a 9th- or 10th-century water-damaged Cassiodorus and a 10th-century Cicero with this fine initial C:

1. Pal. lat. 761 Codicis Iustiniani imp. libri IX (1255)
2. Pal. lat. 791 Iacobus de Alvarottus: Iacobi de Alvarottis patavini de feudis (15. Jh.)
3. Pal. lat. 794 Sammelhandschrift (15. Jh.)
4. Pal. lat. 800 (Iacobi) Gentilis (Brixiensis) repertorium iuris (Pars I) (15. Jh.)
5. Pal. lat. 801 (Iacobi) Gentilis (Brixiensis) repertorium iuris (Pars II) (15. Jh.)
6. Pal. lat. 802 Repertorium iuris (15. Jh.)
7. Pal. lat. 803 Repertorium iuris canonici (15. Jh.)
8. Pal. lat. 804 Tabula doctorum, i. e. repertorium universale iuridicum, theologicum, morale [Pars I] (15. Jh.)
9. Pal. lat. 805 Tabula doctorum, i. e. repertorium universale iuridicum, theologicum, morale [Pars II] (15. Jh.)
10. Pal. lat. 806 Repertorium universale iuridicum, theologicum, morale [Pars I] (15. Jh.)
11. Pal. lat. 807 Repertorium iuris ; Conclusiones sexti libri decretalium (15. Jh.)
12. Pal. lat. 808 Repertorium universale iuridicum, theologicum, morale [Pars III] (15. Jh.)
13. Pal. lat. 809 Repertorium universale iuridicum, theologicum, morale [Pars VI] (15. Jh.)
14. Pal. lat. 810 Repertorium universale iuridicum, theologicum, morale [Pars II] (15. Jh.)
15. Pal. lat. 812 Repertorium universale iuridicum, theologicum, morale [Pars V] (15. Jh.)
16. Pal. lat. 820 Mathey Palmery (sic) florentini de temporibus ad Petrum Cosmae filium medicem ; Eusebii (et) Hieronomi (sic) presbyteri chronica, a Prospero continuata (15. Jh.)
17. Pal. lat. 821 Eusebii et Hieronymi chronicon, a Prospero continuatum (15. Jh.)
18. Pal. lat. 823 Cassiodorii historia ecclesiastica tripartita (9.-10. Jh.)
19. Pal. lat. 826 Anastasii Bibliothecarii historia ecclesiastica tripartita (11. Jh.)
20. Pal. lat. 827 Pauli Horosii presbiteri ad Augustinum episcopum hystoriarum contra accusatores temporum christianorum, libri VII (13.-14. Jh.)
21. Pal. lat. 828 Sammelhandschrift (11.,14., 15. Jh.)
22. Pal. lat. 830 Mariani Scott chronicon (11. Jh.)
23. Pal. lat. 832 Sammelhandschrift (14. Jh.)
24. Pal. lat. 837 Ludolphi Carthusiani de uita Christi in euangelio tradita pars secunda et ultima (15. Jh.)
25. Pal. lat. 838 (Ludolphi Carthusiani) de vita Ihesu in ewangelio (sic) tradita, pars prima (15. Jh.)
26. Pal. lat. 844 Vitae patrum (15. Jh.)
27. Pal. lat. 849 Jacobus : Legenda sanctorum (14. Jh.)
28. Pal. lat. 918 Plutarchi vitae in latinum translatae (15. Jh.)
29. Pal. lat. 928 Gesta Romanorum ; Historia septem sapientum (Süddeutschland, 14. Jh.)
30. Pal. lat. 970 Giovanni ; Boccaccio, Giovanni: Sammelband (Italien, 1379 ; 15. Jh.)
31. Pal. lat. 971 Honorius ; Johannes ; Petrus : Sammelhandschrift (Frankenthal, 1508)
32. Pal. lat. 1093 Galenus: Sammelhandschrift (Italien, 14. Jh.)
33. Pal. lat. 1095 Galenus: Sammelhandschrift (Italien (Südfrankreich), 14. Jh.)
34. Pal. lat. 1099 Galenus; Avicenna; Albertus : Medizinische Sammelhandschrift ((Heidelberg), 2. Hälfte 15. Jh. (1475/77))
35. Pal. lat. 1120 Avicenna; Knab, Erhardus: Fen quarta libri Canonis primi (Heidelberg, 1467)
36. Pal. lat. 1183 Knab, Erhardus: Sammelhandschrift (Heidelberg, 1465/66)
37. Pal. lat. 1232 Avicenna; Knab, Erhardus: Medizinischer Sammelband (Heidelberg, um 1470)
38. Pal. lat. 1242 Ps.-Albertus Magnus; Odo ; Johannes : Medizinischer Sammelband (Südwestdeutschland , Freiburg (III), 14. Jh. (I) ; 1. Drittel 15. Jh. (II) ; 1419 (III) ; 1. Hälfte 15. Jh. (IV))
39. Pal. lat. 1246 Avicenna; Thaddaeus; Gentilis : Medizinische Sammelhandschrift ((Heidelberg, 122ff.), letztes Drittel 15. Jh. (nach 1468))
40. Pal. lat. 1263 Regimen sanitatis für Friedrich IV. von der Pfalz (Hedelberg, 1593)
41. Pal. lat. 1274 Matthaeus : Circa instans seu de simplcibus medicinis (Westdeutschland, 13./14. Jh.)
42. Pal. lat. 1310 Lanfrancus ; Ps.-Galenus: Sammelhandschrift (Montpellier, 14. Jh. (1325))
43. Pal. lat. 1327 Laurentius Rusius; Iordanus ; Knab, Erhardus; Bartholomaeus de Montagnana; Zacharias de Feltris: Medizinische Sammelhandschrift (Heidelberg, 15. Jh. (1476-479))
44. Pal. lat. 1334 Franciscus : Defensorium inviolatae virginitatis beatae Mariae (Blockbuch) (Regensburg, 1471)
45. Pal. lat. 1360 Strabo: Strabonis Geographica (Deutschland, 2. Drittel 15. Jh.)
46. Pal. lat. 1445 Leopoldus ; Yaḥya ibn Abi Manṣūr /al-Ma'mūnī; Hermes; Zael; Guido ; Albertus ; Johannes : Astrologische Sammelhandschrift: Miscellanea (Süddeutschland, Ende 15. Jh.)
47. Pal. lat. 1480 Cicero, Marcus Tullius: Orationes (Italien, 15. Jh.)
48. Pal. lat. 1484 Cicero, Marcus Tullius: Orationes (Italien, 15. Jh.)
49. Pal. lat. 1497 Cicero, Marcus Tullius: Epistulae ad familiares (I-XVI) (Italien, 15. Jh.)
50. Pal. lat. 1500 Cicero, Marcus Tullius: Epistulae ad familiares (I-XVI) (Italien, 14.-15. Jh.)
51. Pal. lat. 1504 Cicero, Marcus Tullius: Epistulae ad familiares (I-XVI) (Italien, 14.-15. Jh.)
52. Pal. lat. 1505 Cicero, Marcus Tullius: Epistulae ad familiares (I-VII, IX-XVI) (Italien, 15. Jh.)
53. Pal. lat. 1506 Cicero, Marcus Tullius: Epistulae ad familiares (I-VII, IX-XVI) (Italien, 15. Jh.)
54. Pal. lat. 1507 Cicero, Marcus Tullius: Epistulae ad familiares (I-XVI) (Italien, 15. Jh.)
55. Pal. lat. 1514 Cicero, Marcus Tullius: Tusculanae disputationes (Italien, 10. Jh.)
56. Pal. lat. 1566 Palladius, Rutilius Taurus Aemilianus: Opus agriculturae (Italien, 14. Jh.)
57. Pal. lat. 1587 Sidonius, Gaius Sollius Apollinaris; Serenus, Quintus; Ps.-Crispus Mediolanensis Diaconus: Sammelhandschrift (Italien, 15. Jh.)
58. Pal. lat. 1609 Erasmus, Desiderius: Enchiridion militis Christiani (Frankreich (?), nach 1574)
59. Pal. lat. 1610 Oratio de natura leonis (Pfalz, um 1590-1594)
60. Pal. lat. 1611 Guido : Sammelhandschrift (Italien, 13. Jh. ; 14. Jh.)
61. Pal. lat. 1675 Francesco Ceccharelli: Commentum in Senecae tragoedias (Italien, um 1440)
62. Pal. lat. 1730 Petrarca, Francesco: Sammelhandschrift (Italien (?), um 1440, 1442)
63. Pal. lat. 1733 Gruterus, Janus: Anthologia (Heidelberg, 1602)
64. Pal. lat. 1734 Carmina et orationes festivae (Cambridge, 1613)
65. Pal. lat. 1744 Veit Örtel: Annotationes (Wittenberg, 1554-1557)
66. Pal. lat. 1758 Gian Francesco Poggio Braccolini; Valla, Lorenzo (Deutschland, um 1465-1470)
67. Pal. lat. 1823 Luther, Martin: Excerpta (Weimar (?), Mitte 16. Jh.)

This is Piggin's Unofficial List number 67. If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for news of more additions to Digita Vaticana.

Queen's Library

Christina Vasa was not bookish. Erudite, intellectual and knowledgeable in nine languages, she had one of the finest private libraries of old manuscripts in Europe. But power was her drug. She wore a dagger, ran wars and had people murdered for crossing her. Last year I admired her silver throne in Stockholm:

Out of boredom after 10 years as King of Sweden (the Swedes refused to call her "queen"), she abdicated, took her library with her and toured her cavalcade as if she owned all Europe (Daddy nearly did. But Gustav II Adolf of Sweden had been killed in battle in 1632 just as his conquests were advancing.)

After her death in 1689, the papacy finangled ownership of Christina's famous library, and legions of scholars have tried to unravel where she got all these prizes from. Élisabeth Pellegrin has suggested that apart from the widespread pillaging of libraries in the 17th century, a main factor was the depreciation of manuscript values after the rise of print.

Of the two Reg.lat. items new online this week, one, Reg.lat.1705, is the Bucolica commentary of Servius Grammaticus. It may be French, though not one of the very old mss used in the edition. In a quick web search I cannot find exactly where it came from. Perhaps it was picked up by her dealers in Paris and sent to Stockholm? There is 1641 receipt written in Paris on fol. 1r:

The other, Reg.lat.1881, a Renaissance Quintilian, turns out not to have been Christina's. The papal library was perhaps short of shelves, and this codex got later shoved into Reg.lat. (you know how it is when your bookcases get too full). Pellegrin says it was in fact a papal acquisition post-1690 and had once belonged to Niccolò Perotti (1429-1480), archbishop of Siponto. Here's an angel in it, dancing not on a pin but in a thicket:

One might think that 325 years later, Sweden would either demand the Fonds de la Reine back, or seize its chance to virtually recover the Vasa treasures as a digital library online, now that the technology exists to replicate it and the Vatican is willing. After all, the Swedish taxpayer paid for these fantastic manuscripts in the first place.

Germany is already replicating online the Palatine Library, a similarly sized and esteemed collection from Heidelberg seized by the papacy. Search the virtual Bibliotheca Palatatina here. But astonishingly, the Swedes do nothing. Add your opinion in the comments below if you think Sweden should wake up and act on this opportunity.

Here is the full list of 49 manuscripts brought online on August 24:

1. Borg.copt.109.cass.XX.fasc.78
2. Borg.copt.109.cass.XXII.fasc.89
3. Reg.lat.1705
4. Reg.lat.1881
5. Urb.gr.33
6. Vat.ebr.38
7. Vat.ebr.39
8. Vat.ebr.364
9. Vat.ebr.371
10. Vat.ebr.374
11. Vat.ebr.375
12. Vat.ebr.376
13. Vat.ebr.378
14. Vat.ebr.379
15. Vat.ebr.380
16. Vat.ebr.381
17. Vat.ebr.382
18. Vat.ebr.383
19. Vat.ebr.384.pt.2
20. Vat.ebr.385
21. Vat.ebr.386
22. Vat.ebr.387
23. Vat.ebr.388
24. Vat.ebr.389
25. Vat.lat.135
26. Vat.lat.254
27. Vat.lat.634
28. Vat.lat.758
29. Vat.lat.796
30. Vat.lat.818
31. Vat.lat.820
32. Vat.lat.831
33. Vat.lat.833
34. Vat.lat.844
35. Vat.lat.846
36. Vat.lat.850
37. Vat.lat.860
38. Vat.lat.872
39. Vat.lat.874
40. Vat.lat.904
41. Vat.lat.925
42. Vat.lat.934
43. Vat.lat.942
44. Vat.lat.945
45. Vat.lat.950
46. Vat.lat.962
47. Vat.lat.964

This is Piggin's Unofficial List number 66. If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for news of more additions to Digita Vaticana.

• Pellegrin Élisabeth. "Possesseurs français et italiens de manuscrits latins du fonds de la Reine à la Bibliothèque Vaticane." In: Revue d'histoire des textes, bulletin n°3 (1973), 1974. pp. 271-297; DOI : 10.3406/rht.1974.1097 http://www.persee.fr/doc/rht_0373-6075_1974_num_3_1973_1097

The 1K Moment

The biggest manuscript series in the Vatican Library, comprising at least a fifth of the overall repository volume, is the Vat. lat. collection: the codices in Latin that were not purchased in complete libraries as other collections were, but acquired one by one as gifts to or purchases by the papacy. On August 10, the digitizers brought the 1,0000th item from this series online.

The Vat.lat. page with 1,000 thumbnails has become a roadblock in the portal, since it downloads very slowly, and it will be interesting to see if the portal designers can find some way to make it less unwieldy.

Here is the full list of 65 new digitizations, which bring the current total to 5,267:

1. Barb.lat.154 - Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, a Renaissance manuscript. Below is a detail showing Hector. Details
   
2. Borg.copt.109.cass.XX.fasc.75 - Details
3. Borg.copt.109.cass.XX.fasc.76 - Details
4. Borg.copt.109.cass.XX.fasc.77 - Details
5. Borg.copt.109.cass.XX.fasc.79 - Details
6. Borg.copt.109.cass.XXI.fasc.80 - Details
7. Borg.copt.109.cass.XXII.fasc.85 - Details
8. Borg.copt.109.cass.XXII.fasc.86 - Details
9. Borg.copt.109.cass.XXII.fasc.87 - Details
10. Borg.copt.109.cass.XXII.fasc.88 - Details
11. Ott.lat.1420 - Details
12. Ott.lat.1529 -  Justin's Philippic Histories, whereby the illuminations include the bedroom scene below - Details
    
13. Ott.lat.2005 - Details
14. Reg.lat.16 - Details
15. Reg.lat.1823 - 9th-century manuscript in a Beneventan pre-Carolingian hand of Isidore's Sententiae and the Instructiones of Eucherius. In the edition of the Sentences, this is witness Q.  Details
16. Vat.ar.462 - Details
17. Vat.ebr.34 - Details
18. Vat.ebr.35 - Details
19. Vat.ebr.36 - Details
20. Vat.ebr.37 - Details
21. Vat.ebr.325 - Details
22. Vat.ebr.332 - Details
23. Vat.ebr.334 - Details
24. Vat.ebr.336 - Details
25. Vat.ebr.338 - Details
26. Vat.ebr.339 - Details
27. Vat.ebr.341 - Details
28. Vat.ebr.343 - Details
29. Vat.ebr.346 - Details
30. Vat.ebr.348 - Details
31. Vat.ebr.349 - Details
32. Vat.ebr.350 - Details
33. Vat.ebr.351 - Details
34. Vat.ebr.352 - Details
35. Vat.ebr.353 - Details
36. Vat.ebr.354 - Details
37. Vat.ebr.355 - Details
38. Vat.ebr.357 - Details
39. Vat.ebr.358 - Details
40. Vat.ebr.359 - Details
41. Vat.ebr.360 - Details
42. Vat.ebr.361 - Details
43. Vat.ebr.362 - Details
44. Vat.ebr.363 - Details
45. Vat.ebr.365 - Details
46. Vat.ebr.366 - Details
47. Vat.ebr.367 - Details
48. Vat.ebr.368 - Details
49. Vat.ebr.369 - Details
50. Vat.ebr.377 - Details
51. Vat.lat.259 - Athanasius, Details
52. Vat.lat.291 - Ambrose, Details
53. Vat.lat.382 - 16th century miscellany including Cyril of Jerusalem, Augustine. Details
54. Vat.lat.761 - Thomas Aquinas' In Aristotelis librum Analytica posteriora and another brief text in a textura hand. (St Louis catalog.) There appears to have been a flurry of (unavailing) interest in the identity of the Montpellier Dominican friar who once once owned this codex, evidenced only by a rubbed-out ex libris note on fol 57v: Iste liber est fratris...ordinis fratrum predicatorum. Conventus Montispessulani. Details
55. Vat.lat.793 - Details
56. Vat.lat.804 - Details
57. Vat.lat.821 - Details
58. Vat.lat.832 - Details
59. Vat.lat.847 - Details
60. Vat.lat.862 - Details
61. Vat.lat.865 - Details
62. Vat.lat.892 - Pope Sixtus IV, Details
63. Vat.lat.914 - Bonaventura, Commentaries, Details
64. Vat.lat.14596 - Details
65. Vat.turc.148 - Details

This is Piggin's Unofficial List number 65. If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for news of more additions to Digita Vaticana.

Mental Space

To mentally "place" something is to know where it belongs. If you can place a hundred thousand words or faces or ideas, you command great knowledge. Often too, such a store enables you to quickly solve problems. Growing evidence suggests that "placing" is not merely a metaphor, but that we really do inwardly arrange concepts in spatial frames to think about them or recall them. It seems, indeed, that having extensive mental "spaces" is a key to intelligence.

One of the great goals of cognitive science is to understand how spatial-thinking skills assist -- and are perhaps fundamental to -- human thought. The mechanisms involved are not conscious ones, so simply reflecting on what it means to place, arrange and retrieve concepts in our mental space will not make us any the wiser.

How then are we to observe humans storing and retrieving ideas in the mental space they construct? The evidence we can use is of the indirect type, but useful nevertheless.

Metaphors and analogy provide one such monitor, most famously in our tendency to speak of time as "before" and "behind" us. Gestures are a second and rich source of evidence, since the upwards, downwards and sideways movements of the hands seem to unconsciously describe the mental space we are using. It has long been known as well that our eyes move in sympathy with our thoughts, so that a dart of the gaze to a place where there is in fact nothing to see is an indicator that we may be navigating an "inner" space. The devices we invent to visualize or spatialize our ideas, particularly diagrams, are a fourth tangent into this mysterious human capability. As I noted some time ago in another blog post, observing the thinking processes of the congenitally blind is a fifth method of observing pure visuo-spatial cognition.

At the annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society which has just finished in Philadelphia, interesting evidence was produced in two of these approaches.

In one paper, Gesture reveals spatial analogies during complex relational reasoning, Kensy Cooperrider with Dedre Gentner and Susan Goldin-Meadow observed 19 students explaining stockmarket bubbles and takeovers with spontaneous gestures to elucidate these complex mechanisms. "The participants constructed these spatial models fluidly and more or less unconsciously," the paper notes. To me, this does indeed suggest a "spatial mind" contributing to human reasoning.

In another paper, Spatial Interference and Individual Differences in Looking at Nothing for Verbal Memory, Alper Kumcu and Robin L. Thompson used gaze direction to show that people use an imaginary mental space to remember things, in this case words. Some years ago, Martin Wallraff amusingly alluded to oral examinations where students say, "I can't remember what the book said, but I can remember exactly where on the page it said it." In this paper, the authors tested 48 students and found their eyes darted to the place on a tiny page where a word used to be, leading to the proposal that there is an "automatic, instantaneous spatial indexing mechanism for words" in the mind.

As always, these experiments must be treated with a degree of caution. The subjects were students whose native language is English. We do not know if the results hold true in other cultures, or for the uneducated, or at other times in history. But they do suggest that we may one day succeed in mapping the human mental space and that the objective of this blog - understanding the "natural" mindlike ways to arrange information on pages and in diagrams - is indeed full of promise.

Cooperrider et al. note, "The ubiquity of abstract spatial models like Venn diagrams, family trees, and cladograms, for example, hints at the wider utility of spatial analogy in relational reasoning."

Philadelphia also had a co-located diagrams meeting (mainly on Venn diagams) and a conference on Spatial Cognition, but the interesting papers from those events are sadly not online.

Vatican Mappamundi

In a previous post, I observed that the ancient world did not employ maps as we do. But certain brilliant foundational achievements in cartography are the work of antiquity. One is the Geography of Ptolemy of Alexandria. Another is the mappamundi, a late antique educational aid which visualized the whole known world in semi-schematic fashion.

The two oldest extant examples are the Vatican Mappamundi, copied between 762 and 777 according to Leonid Chekin, and the less detailed Albi Mappamundi (2nd half of the 8th century). France digitized the Albi map and won Unesco Memory of the World status for it last year. It is a wonderful moment to see that its equally old counterpart at the Vatican is now also online as of August 2, 2016. Here.

These two are far older artefacts than similar and justly celebrated maps of medieval provenance such as the Cotton Mappamundi, the Hereford Map, the (lost) Ebstorf Map, the London Psalter Map and the Beatus maps. All mappaemundi would appear to be evolutions from Late Antique seeds. The Vatican map, bound into Vat.lat.6018, shows the south at the top of the page. Patrick Gautier Dalché has superbly discussed their history, making certain essential points.

One is that the Vatican map cannot be a Merovingian-period design, but must be a traditionalizing copy of a diagram made well before the 8th century, since it distinguishes the Roman Empire's provinces of Hispania Ulterior and Hispania Inferior next to the Pyrenees (below): any educated 8th-century person would  have to be aware that contemporary Spain had long since been unified under centuries of Visigothic rule before recently falling into Islamic hands, so this was even then a historical map:

The other key point is that the three mappaemundi at the Vatican, in Albi and in the Beatus Commentary on the Apocalypse appear to have three distinct and separate origins to them. Gautier Dalché asserts that all were compiled by late antique eruditio from educational lists of places, but I find his argument about this direction of conversion unconvincing.

The mappamundi is bound into a miscellany which also includes some of Isidore's Etymologies (which is why it is sometimes oddly termed the "Pseudo-Isidorean Vatican Map"). There are two Trismegistos entries for the codex. One, TM 387432, notes the map as a source for the 1965 Itineraria et alia geographica (CCSL 175) pp. 455-463, and the other, TM 66146, points to Lowe, CLA 1 50, where palimpsested text faintly visible under folios 93, 98, 127, 128 is palaeographically identified as Italian of the 7th century. A celebrated list of animal sounds in Latin by Suetonius is also in the codex. Here is tizziare, the basis for titiatio, the Latin word adopted by David Meadows for "Twitter":

I do not know if the map has yet been plotted and published online, and am unable to find it sketched in Konrad Miller's great survey of mappaemundi (he does reproduce the Albi map), but in any case now you can see it in the original. It is an essential resource to everyone fascinated by the history of cartography.

The French authorities noted in their Unesco application that the Vatican and Albi mappaemundi are the oldest non-abstract maps of the whole known world we possess (comparable only to the Peutinger Table, a medieval copy of a late antique plan of the world, and possibly two very ancient clay tablets (Mesopotamia, c. 2600 BC, and Babylonia, c. 600 BC) showing the world). These are presumably the Nuzi map tablet at the Semitic Museum in Harvard and the map tablet BM 92687 at the British Museum. Take a look at the Albi presentation page, the high-resolution digitization (one cannot link to pages, but seek page 115) and the lush but overdone video. Here is how the Albi Mappamundi shows Gallia and Hispania:

Here is the full list of 33 digitizations on August 2:

1. Barb.lat.3517.pt.A - just the binding: Details
2. Borg.copt.109.cass.XXI.fasc.81 - Details
3. Borg.copt.109.cass.XXII.fasc.82 - Details
4. Borg.copt.109.cass.XXII.fasc.83 - Details
5. Borg.copt.109.cass.XXII.fasc.84 - Details
6. Ross.357 - Details
7. Vat.ar.468.pt.3 - Details
8. Vat.ebr.320 - Details
9. Vat.ebr.327 - Details
10. Vat.ebr.328 - Details
11. Vat.ebr.331.pt.2 - Details
12. Vat.ebr.333 - Details
13. Vat.ebr.335 - Details
14. Vat.ebr.337 - Details
15. Vat.ebr.340 - Details
16. Vat.ebr.342 - Details
17. Vat.ebr.345 - Details
18. Vat.ebr.347 - Details
19. Vat.lat.30 - Details
20. Vat.lat.158 - Details
21. Vat.lat.273 - Details
22. Vat.lat.316 - Details
23. Vat.lat.648 - Details
24. Vat.lat.706 - Details
25. Vat.lat.760 - Details
26. Vat.lat.877 - Details
27. Vat.lat.880 - Details
28. Vat.lat.881 - Details
29. Vat.lat.1907 - Details
30. Vat.lat.6018 - described above. Details
31. Vat.lat.10696, one of the Vatican's most marvellous treasures, a single sheet from an otherwise lost Late Antique copy in uncial script of Livy's Ab Urbe Condita. This parchment had been used to wrap up some Christian relics from Palestine (mainly earth and stones from holy sites) kept since early medieval times in a box at the Lateran until it was realized in 1906 that the wrapping-tissue was itself an extraordinary relic. Discussed in a 2014 article by Julia Smith (PDF) from a book edited by Valerie Garver and Owen Phelan. What a discovery! Lowe's note (TM 66153) at CLA 1 57 suggests the uncial must date from the 4th or 5th century. Below is the first part. Details
    
32. Vat.lat.13989 - Details
33. Vat.lat.14207 - Details

This is Piggin's Unofficial List number 64. If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for news of more additions to Digita Vaticana.

Deschaux, Jocelyne. Mappa Mundi d’Albi. Albi, 2014. Unesco PDF

Chekin, Leonid S. ‘Easter Tables and the Pseudo-Isidorean Vatican Map’. Imago Mundi 51, no. 1 (1999): 13–23.

Gautier Dalché, Patrick. ‘L’Héritage Antique de Cartographie Médiévale: Les Problèmes et les Acquis’. In Cartography in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Fresh Perspectives, New Methods, edited by Richard J. A. Talbert and Richard Watson Unger. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Google Books

Miller, Konrad. Mappaemundi: die ältesten Weltkarten. 6 vols. Stuttgart: Roth, 1895. Online