These interpretative essays are intended as short guides to the content of the online map and its uses, as well as a record of the research and development work that went into making of the web-resource and its constituent parts.
In ‘The scribes of the Gough Map’ Elizabeth Solopova explores the evidence from the map’s palaeography for the presence of more than one scribe, those individuals who wrote the map’s texts. This is important for understanding how the map was created in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In ‘Historiography and prosopography’ Nick Millea and Keith Lilley reflect on the later contexts of the Gough Map, and how it arrived into the collections of the Bodleian Library, as well as the uncertain ways in which it emerged from a world of private ownership to become a publicly-visible object. In her essay on ‘Linguistic evidence’, Elizabeth Solopova examines how the map’s writing can be used to indicate the likely backgrounds of those who inscribed the map, particularly their social and geographical provenance, while in her essay on ‘Place-name records’ Elizabeth sets out the different entries for each place mentioned on the Gough Map that forms the basis for the online version of the map.
The final two essays also offer some indication of the processes that went into the making of the online map-resource, firstly on aspects of the map’s re-digitization work undertaken by Keith Lilley, Lorraine Barry and Catherine Porter, and secondly on the creation of the web-resource itself, and the innovations developed to deliver the map online by Paul Vetch and the technical team at King’s College London. Also available is a list of all the many abbreviations that are used in the online resource for the place-name entries.