Medieval Christian cosmology shaped Europe’s geography, discouraging exploration.

Evidence

For what lay beyond, Europe relied on other sources of knowledge—classical, biblical, legendary, and mythological. Asia remained largely a world of elephants and other wonders almost as remote as sub-Saharan Africa. There were four continents—Europe, Africa, Asia, and “Terra Australis Incognita” (“The Unknown Southern Land”)—the way to the latter being judged impassable. On medieval maps, the landmass crowded out the oceans: there was no Pacific, and the Atlantic was a narrow, and extremely dangerous, waterway. The world was often represented as a wheel, superimposed on the body of Christ, with Jerusalem at its hub. This conception of the world did not encourage free and wide-ranging travel. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 563

Categorization

• XREF: The Christocentric world-map is a concrete early instance of how a worldview constructs geographic reality — feeds the representation-of-the-Other toolkit.