The Mad Mapmaker of Pavia and Avignon

 

The strange topographical silhouettes and monsters of the mad mapmaker, Opicinus de Canistris, who lived his exiled life from Pavia in Avignon, are something you can’t unsee. I first heard of the fourteenth-century scribe in a graduate seminar in late medieval Italian art history that became a book, Le Dialectique du Monstre (Dialectic of the Monster) by Sylvain Piron, a book that went on to win multiple awards, in France and Italy. Since that time I had wanted to work the scribe and his art into my fiction, but how?

Then one evening, losing my way to an engagement, as usual, a character came into my head, a man who studies maps but cannot read them, from a place wiped from cartographical reality. Thus was Srđan born, Croatian medievalist in exile who pores over these maps in Vatican city to his own tipping point and beyond.

That this story has just been published khōréō, a journal devoted to voices of diaspora, touches me and honors it profoundly. I am so glad that there, if nowhere else, Srđan and Opicino have finally found a home. I hope "Mappamundi" finds favor with you.

Opicino de Canistris, "Palatinus latinus 1993", f. 13r., part., Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana