Notes on Terminology and Translation
The terms north, south, east and west in English are as a rule written in lower case throughout. The only exception is when these terms have been used to refer to modern concepts or ideological constructs, such as the West or the Orient.
1On this orthographical distinction, see Alastair Bonnett, The Idea of the West: Culture, Politics and History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 4–5, and Georgios Varouxakis, ‘The Godfather of “Occidentality”: Auguste Comte and the Idea of “the West”’, Modern Intellectual History 16 (2019): 415–17. When citing modern translations, their orthography has likewise been modified to conform with this principle. Similarly, where a modern translation of a medieval source has used the term ‘Orient’, it has been changed to ‘east’.
The term
Saracenus has generally been translated as ‘Muslim’. When appearing in lists of peoples, however, such a translation is not always straightforwardly possible and in these cases it has therefore been left as ‘Saracen’.
2See Shokoofeh Raajabzadeh, ‘The Depoliticized Saracen and Muslim Erasure’, Literature Compass 16 (2019): 1–8. Where such a distinction can be made, I have translated proper nouns that would have been foreign or even mythical to twelfth-century, western European authors in line with the medieval terminology, rather than using the modern English names. Thus, for example, I refer throughout to the Tanais rather than the Don River to maintain a critical distance from our own conception of the ‘real’ geography that these authors may be discussing.
The use of the term ‘continent’ to describe Europe, Africa and Asia is anachronistic when applied to medieval sources. In the Middle Ages, they were understood as three parts (
tres partes) of a single coherent landmass. Therefore, I follow these medieval sources throughout in describing Asia, Europe and Africa as the three parts of the world or its tripartition. Where it appears, the term ‘continental’ has been used in its original sense as the antonym of ‘insular’.
3On this terminology, see Christoph Mauntel, Die Erdteile in der Weltordnung des Mittelalters: Asien – Europa – Afrika (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 2023), 41–7, and Ingrid Baumgärtner, ‘Winds and Continents: Concepts of Structuring the World and Its Parts’, in Mapping Narrations – Narrating Maps: Concepts of the World in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, ed. Daniel Gneckow, Anna Hollenbach and Phillip Landgrebe (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022), 50. More generally, see Christoph Mauntel et al., ‘Mapping Continents, Inhabited Quarters and the Four Seas. Divisions of the World and the Ordering of Spaces in Latin-Christian, Arabic-Islamic and Chinese Cartography in the Twelfth to Sixteenth Centuries: A Critical Survey and Analysis’, Journal of Transcultural Medieval Studies 5, no. 2 (2019): 295–367.Except where a short Latin quotation has been closely paraphrased in the text, when a handful of grammatically relevant words have been added to the original language quotation for context, or where a substantially similar quotation has already been translated, all quotations in languages apart from English have as a rule received a translation either in the text or in the notes.
Translations from the Bible have generally been drawn from the Douay-Rheims, though often with my own adaptions. In all other cases, unless a translation is cited, the translation is my own.