Previously: Two monks invent Renaissance art.
MONK #1: what does Hell look like?
MONK #2: big upside-down beehive
MONK #1: What is the population of the world
roughly
like how many people do you think live in it
MONK #2: three at the absolute most
but they’re all enormous
MONK #2: what are you drawing right now
Asia?
MONK #1: yeah
MONK #2: you should put in a warning about lions
because there might be lions there
in Asia
and people need to know
MONK #1: are there lions in Asia?
MONK #2: yeah
probably
I mean if I were a lion
that’s the first place I’d go
MONK #1: okay I’ll put something in there
MONK #2: draw him bigger
MONK #1: what?
MONK #2: Draw the lion bigger
just in case the lions there are also giants
MONK #1: how do you know the lions there are giants?
MONK #2: I mean
how do you know the lions there aren’t giants
MONK #1: good point
MONK #1: wait remind me of what Asia looks like when you put it all together at once
MONK #2: a big horse with wings that’s about to eat Europe
MONK #1: right right thanks
MONK #2: no problem
MONK #1: what does Europe look like compared to all the other continents
MONK #2: exactly the same
but pointing in different directions and shaded in different colors
MONK #1: so like Africa, but going north?
MONK #2: exactly
MONK #1: oh wow, it looks like a bunch of flower petals!
MONK #2: pretty cool right
MONK #1: what’s the nearest country to Scotland
MONK #2: a giant lobster
MONK #1: how do I draw England
MONK #2: however you want
doesn’t matter
MONK #1: really?
MONK #2: yeah
make it look like a messed-up dick or whatever, it doesn’t matter
MONK #1: wait but so how much of Scotland is there
MONK #2: I told you
it doesn’t matter
MONK #1: no no I know
but just like, I’m curious
MONK #2: barely any
there’s barely any Scotland at all
MONK #1: what surrounds the earth
MONK #2: mm
trees
lobsters
some guys trying to blow on us
horrible red chaos
‘MONK #2: oh and one giant man trying to shoot an arrow at us
MONK #2: hey idk if I forgot to tell you this but all of Asia is mostly just one enormous castle
MONK #1: what does the whole world look like when you put it all together
MONK #2: weirdly enough
mostly text
like a big O with a T on it
MONK #1: really
MONK #2: yeah, very few pictures or mountain ranges or whatever, mostly just words in Latin
MONK #1: Where does Africa end
MONK #2: oh it doesn’t
just sort of blobs out into Antartica and keeps going around the whole world
MONK #1: oh okay
Tags: i know cartography is older than the middle ages, i love these dudes, medieval getting used pretty loosely here, poking gentle fun at medieval art, the middle ages, they did the best they could with the tools they had at the time, two monks inventing things
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Scots get all cagey when you bring up their Huge Ancestral Lobster wandering around the bay.
I know, their most frequent reply when you ask about it is, “What lobster?” Pfft. As if we don’t KNOW, okay people from Scotland? As if.
No referring directly to the Lobs Ness Monster.
I kind of wish maps still had lions and lobsters and stuff in them. Like, “holy shit, be aware, THERE ARE TOTALLY GIANT LOBSTERS THERE so bring mayonnaise and drawn butter.”
These guys need to bring a GIANT LEMON because it’s fish for dinner forever:
I like how there are some dudes hacking at it, and also Bagpipe Guy up there.
It’s surprising that they’re not more alarmed about the whole thing. I suppose back then giant fish were plowing into islands all the time, though.
I assume that’s the region known as… Wales? BOOM.
Krakens – also good with mayonnaise and butter! And a spritz of lemon.
Would also be quite useful for road trips:
“Are we there yet?”
“I dunno — have you seen a giant lobster yet?”
Pretty close to how you know you’ve made it to Providence.
I love these two guys. I want to see them invent Dada.
I want to buy Monk #2 a drink and let him explain the world to me.
With his natural 100% confidence in everything he says.
The very first mansplainer, Scrotus Oblivious.
Well played. Although I would listen to him because he is pretty hilarious. Also at least he’s not trying to explain women.
Oh, I’d totally listen to him. Get a big ol’ glass of something strong, and just sit there listening, until the giggles in my brain leak out to the outside.
Ha, not yet. Two Medieval Monks Invent Misogyny.
Well there was that one time he tried to explain where boobs are.
And also the time that he explained what makes a woman attractive: nice eyes, long hair, red lips, no shoulders.
*applause*
On the last one, I know, logically, that the brown bits are mountains, but they just look like poops.
Can’t unsee that.
The southern end of Africa blobs into Antarctica. We call that “The Baconlands”. Because of the giant bacon.
“What do mountains look like?” “IDK, either bacon strips or giant turds. Up to you, really.”
I never thought I’d love mansplaining so much, but these monks really get me.
EDITORS EDITORS HELP
this series needs to be tagged with “mansplaining” pLEASE
Monksplaining – infinitely less painful than regular mansplaining.
Lol, perfect. Mallory, along the lines of your “live each day with the confidence of…” tweets, I hope one day to have the confidence of monk 2 when responding to monk 1’s questions about how to draw things.
Pretty sure if there actually was a dude with an arrow pointed at the Earth at all times he would have loosed that thing SO MANY TIMES by now.
Well yeah, that’s where volcanoes and sinkholes come from.
make it look like a messed-up dick or whatever, it doesn’t matter
dead. I’m dead now.
I have no idea how to put an image in here, but the right side of England as a messed up dick is TOTALLY an elephant! Tell me someone else sees it?
YES, I see it!
Totally, you’re right. Personally I like the flower petal one though. It sort of gets the general location of the continents I guess? I mean if you’re looking for a REAL rough outline…
In a clear display of convergent evolution, elephants also pretty much look like dicks.
It may be all the weed I smoke, but I really dig these monks.
really struck by the overabundance of giant geographical lobsters compared to how few monster crustaceans I generally interact with.
You’re obviously going to the wrong restaurants.
According to every souvenir mug available, Maine’s waterfront buildings are at constant risk of being crushed by giant lobsters. It’s probably written into their insurance policies.
I mean the giant lobsters are probably the most probable thing on those maps. Lobsters don’t age and never stop growing. http://animals.howstuffworks.com/marine-life/400-…
Shout out to the Dante map up top – finally the shit I’ve been studying all semester is culturally relevant.
Cheers for Dante! 13 years after we read it in sophomore English and I can still name all circles/sins. Thanks, Mrs. H!
I’m preeeetty certain that Monk # 2 can time travel, and was in my AP US History class in high school.
Try to tell kids today that Asia used to be a flying horse that suckled at Europe’s teat, and they won’t believe you!
As a Scot, I can confirm that the Loch Ness monster is actually a giant lobster. That map is scarily accurate.
monksplaining ruuuuuuuuules
Monksplaining needs to be a tag on these posts and I cannot believe it isn’t already.
Still better than mercator.
Mercator gets a lot of hate these days and yes Mercator is imperfect, but so are all maps. They’re *all* skewed. That’s how projections work. When making a map you use the projection that best preserves what’s most important: area, shape, distance, or direction. You can’t have all four. Mercator was created for sea navigation purposes, so it preserves direction the best. The fault with Mercator is when folks use it to illustrate things other than direction. It isn’t a bad projection, it’s just being used inappropriately.
That is a phenomenal hellmap, where’s it from
Last time I’ma get lost in the crappy industrial quarter of Dis
Oh my god I just noticed that the giant Scotland-adjacent lobster has a tiny flailing man in his claw!!
Is it just me that thinks it’s crazy that the words “Europe,” “Africa, “Asia”, “London”, and even “Dorset” haven’t changed at all in like a thousand years?
They’ve started spelling it Yourup now, which is crazy because it’s not Yourup, it’s Ourup.
I like all of the giants blowing on us. Like, do the giants that blow on smelly parts of the world have bad breath? Especially the Subway Tunnel giants? I’m assuming.
And again, this remains one of my favorite series on The Toast for all time ever.
People around me are beginning to wonder why I find it necessary to giggle QUITE so much while doing the payroll.
I love these monks and I love you for documenting their influential conversations and I love that everyone in Europe who was in a position to decide things like this decided that Africa would just blob out and enclose the Indian Ocean
FIVE VOTES
me and i counted my cat i hope that's okay
Monk #1: wait, what does a very beautiful woman look like i can't remember
Monk #2: a urinal
Monk #1: a what
Monk #2: a porcelain urinal
Monk #1: oh okay
Too many lobsters
I love Dada, all of the votes for Dada.
What wonderful worlds, but filled with “Angst”.
I love it.
“A big horse with wings ready to eat Europe” is a pretty good description of the Mongols.
STOP STOP RIGHT NOW. WHY DIDN’T I SEE THIS TUESDAY? True story: I had to teach a class on medieval cartography that day and the students did not think it was as exciting as I did. I tried comparing sixteenth-century European maps of Constantinople which show it as all happy and Christian (spoiler: it’s Muslim. it had crescents everywhere, promise.) with Google Maps in Russia and Ukraine of Crimea and the students were like “Isn’t Crimea the title of a Justin Timberlake song?” *headdesk* I could have used this for sure.
Also, please do a “Two Monks Invent Late Medieval German Art” cause it would be awesome and something like this:
Monk 1: what did jesus look like on the cross?
Monk 2: don’t know. there was too much blood.
Monk 1: really
Monk 2: yea you couldn’t even see his face
Monk 1: how much blood? buckets?
Monk 2: waterfalls.
http://www.museenkoeln.de/ausstellungen/wrm_0506_…
To be fair, it was Scotland that they made look like a messed-up dick. They got England right in that one.
I was about to get all grumpy about the distinction between “England” and “Great Britain”.
Yeah, but monks don’t.
There really were lions throughout Asia back then, though. In fact there still are, although the Asiatic lion population is only about 500 or so.
They are not giants, but I reckon any lion you encounter unexpectedly is going to appear alarmingly huge.
I’d gotten through an embarrassingly large part of my year in China when I suddenly stopped and asked, “Wait, all the lions in traditional arts and decor here…does that mean that there were lions living in China?” I’d just never pictured lions living outside of Africa. (In fact I don’t think that clicked until I saw a bank or something that had a Western-style pair of stone lions out front, looking a little like foreign dignitaries refusing to dress in the local style.)
Monk #2 is a huge dirtball, right?
I mean, I know we love him, but he’s trolling the shit out of Monk #1, is he not?
Haha, check out America photobombing the flower petal map. Classic America.
we need monks to invent photoshopping just to deal with dirtbag America
Silly Monk #2, that horse is, at worst, trying to take a tender lick out of the great mound of pink sherbet that is Europe. Look at those friendly eyes!
Would he deny FlyingAsiaHorse even a taste of this icy confection? It’s right in front of him! So sweet and so cold.
And now I’m obviously imagining FlyingAsiaHorse leaving RollerbladingAfricaWombat a note that reads: “This is just to say/I have eaten the Europe that was in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast”
(I know you would think that Africa would be a creature that actually lives there, but that’s continent animals for ya, no damn rules.)
The comments on this post are just as gold as the post itself. I have almost no thumbs left to give!
– What’s the surface of the Earth composed of again?
– Well, half of it is ocean. You can put that on the bottom. One quarter is grass.
– Oh, right…
– And for the rest, just draw some squiggly lines. You know…red, for the desert? And we have to put the rivers somewhere, so red and blue squiggly lines. That’s the hard part, so you should draw a giant pointing an arrow at it. Then people will really notice the effort you put into squiggles.
– I hadn’t thought of that. Thanks.
– Saved you a bunch of time there, eh?
And those three enormous dudes that make up the global population love to dance, it appears.
Can’t stop laughing at Giant Lobster Land. Actually, I hadn’t realized how interested Giant Lobsters are in world domination.
Also, maybe if more maps came with giant winged horses and lobsters and guys shooting us, I would be better at reading them? Because honestly, when I’m trying to figure out how “north” relates to “right or left”, horrible red chaos is basically all I see.
Well, there’s barely any Scotland at all because it’s the Land of Always Winter, right?
I like how in the flower petal map, America is just sort of off in the corner somewhere. Who knows what shape it is. Obviously not a flower shape. Duh.
Love!!!!!
I sent my 18-year old map-loving son your article. His reply:
Meanwhile, Medieval cartographers in the Arab world…
Hey what should we make Europe look like?
How about Europe?
Good call http://i.imgur.com/OssbQN3.jpg
Is it possible that the lion is actually part of the history of the region? Pars (Persia/Iran) has the same lion in its flag prior to islamic republic take over… I came across this by chance but I wonder if u did some digging maybe u can find actual evidence to go with maps