Dr Catherine Delano-Smith

As a Reader at the University of Nottingham, Dr Catherine Delano-Smith took early retirement in 1990 to continue her research from her home in London. She was drawn into the history of maps in the 1980s by J.B. Harley and David Woodward, founding editors of The History of Cartography. Thereafter she has remained in the field of map history, becoming Editor of Imago Mundi, The International Journal for the History of Cartography (1994-2023). Her numerous publications include the monographs Maps in Bibles 1500-1600; An Illustrated Catalogue (Geneva, Droz, 1991) (with Elizabeth M. Ingram); and English Maps. A History (London, British Library Publications, 1999) (with Roger J. P. Kain).

Currently, she is Lead Academic in the Gough Map of Britain (c.1400) Research Project for the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (awarded in 2019 a three-year research grant by The Leverhulme Trust under the title ‘Understanding the medieval Gough Map through physics, chemistry and history’ and thereafter supported by the British Academy and the Marc Fitch Fund). Her article ‘Milieus of mobility: itineraries, route maps, and road maps’, in James R. Akerman (ed.) Cartographies of Travel and Navigation (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2006), 16–68, 294–309, might be of particular interest in the context of the Gough Map.

About the event

This talk follows one given at a previous Medieval History Weekend (April 2022), but not in a way that could have been anticipated at the time. This time two headings, ‘His Problems’ and ‘Our Problems’, suffice to describe the unexpected (and, one might say, gratuitous) research problems left to the modern student by the antiquary Richard Gough, who purchased the map now known by his name at a library auction in 1774 , publishing the first description and reproduction of it six years later.

The original map is drawn in ink and various pigments on a metre-long parchment and dates from sometime between 1400 and 1420. It can be justifiably described as ‘unique’ for its precocity as a large separate sheet map of a single region as much as for its lively display of some 650 places, each represented by a pictorial sign, set against a dense network of rivers. Little else is shown apart from some mountains, a forest or two, and (intriguingly) a couple of mytho-historical event-places. East is at the top, which explains why Dover appears ‘above’ Canterbury!

Recognising his new acquisition as something special, Gough enlisted help to transcribe the toponyms and identify the places before publishing a brief description and a much-reduced engraved copy of the map in British Topography (1780). The historians in the ongoing Gough Map Research Project have been investigating the same questions as faced by Gough and his fellow antiquaries for more than a decade, as pigment scientists and digital technologists investigate the map’s ‘materiality’ (the parchment and pigments).

For all that, though, it must be admitted that even after more than two centuries since the map came into Richard Gough’s hands, a definitive answer has not been found to every question. It does not help that the map carries neither title nor indication of authorship (as was normal for the period), but the modern researcher might be forgiven for not anticipating the number of problems created, directly or indirectly, by Gough himself. None the less, a substantial monograph on the Gough Map, subtitled A New Look, is heading towards publication. The substance of the forthcoming talk is not to anticipate that ‘new look’ but to report on those challenges to our understanding of the map that can be laid at Richard Gough’s own door.