Monsters, marvels and miracles

People at all levels in medieval society were extremely fascinated by the strange and unknown in the world around them. They tried in various ways to cope with the unfamiliar mysterious, monstrous, marvellous, and miraculous forces in order to understand them and give them a coherent meaning.
Voyages were undertaken to remote parts of Asia. Some journeys were real, while others were mere ´armchair travels´. Most people took the descriptions in travel accounts to be the ultimate truth about the mysterious places in lands far away from Europe.
Scholars formed a general view of the God-created cosmos and its seemingly mysterious character, expressed in encyclopaedic works, summae, and in medieval maps, mappaemundi. The majority of the medieval maps were not geographical in a modern sense but cosmological, showing the world from Genesis to the Last Judgment.
Monsters Marvels and Miracles is a collection of 8 articles that brings the reader on a journey through the maps, the voyages and the ideas of cosmos that influenced the world view of the people of the Middle Ages.