Ravenna Cosmography

"The Cosmography of the Unknown Ravennese") is a list of place-names covering the world from India to Ireland, compiled by an anonymous cleric in Ravenna around 700 AD.

Parts of the text, notably that covering Britain, have been published by others, including Richmond and Crawford in 1949, but their document showed little regard for which of the manuscripts provided the information.

However, it contained photographs of the relevant sections from all three manuscripts, which enabled Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews to reconstruct the text from scratch in 2013 (revised in 2020) for his reassessment of its importance for British geography.

There is some evidence that the author has tried to correct or clarify words which were not clear in the original, and there are no stops to separate the place names in the lists, but there are underlined headings to divide up the sections.

[8] The naming of places in Roman Britain has traditionally relied on Ptolemy’s Geography, the Antonine Itinerary and the Peutinger Table, as the Cosmography was seen as full of corruptions, with the ordering of the lists of placenames being haphazard.

[2] In 1949, Sir Ian Richmond and O G S Crawford published a paper they had originally submitted to Archaeologia, which suggested that the sources for the document had included maps or road books, and that many place names described geographical features.

[2] Part of the difficulty with the text is its corruption, which probably results from the author failing to understand his sources, or not appreciating the purpose for which they were written.

Equally, there are some obvious omissions, although the author was not attempting to produce a complete list of places, as his introduction states: "In that Britain we read that there were many civitates and forts, of which we wish to name a few."