The International Prester John Project: How A Global Legend Was Created Across Six Centuries

PROJECT OVERVIEW

This interactive e-book allows readers to explore the legend of Prester John in a number of customizable ways. "The Peregrinations of Prester John" is at once an overview of the legend, a visualization tool, an archive of key primary materials, and a primer in secondary scholarship. 

The organizational core of this project consists of a database that attempts to catalogue all non-Letter references to Prester John. This information is presented in a series of interactive maps created using CartoDB. For each era, readers will encounter maps that provide information on authors of Prester John lore, texts that describe John or his kingdom, and geographical regions identified as the site of John's mythical kingdom. 

This e-book offers five chapters or "paths," organized chronologically, each concerned with the spread of the legend during a particular era. Each "path" offers a short overview of that era, interactive maps that reflect the spread of the legend during that era, and individual entries containing primary and secondary material particular to each author and text within that era. Readers can work through the paths in order or explore individual features of the e-book. 

While the open layout of the project is meant to encourage an individualistic and customizable experience, the overall goal of "The Peregrinations of Prester John" is to illustrate the legend's global impact. In order to achieve this goal, the e-book was designed to provide insight into the following questions especially:
  • How did the legend spread geographically and linguistically over time?
  • Where did people think Prester John’s kingdom was located and how did this change over time?
  • Who wrote about Prester John: when, where, and for what purposes?
  • As the legend changed over time, by what names did writers identify Prester John and to what degree were these names location-dependent?
  • Is there a relationship we can trace between where texts situated Prester John and where these texts were themselves written?
  • Is there any correlation between the putatively historical texts mentioning Prester John (travel narrative, chronicle, geographical treatise) and the reflexively fictional accounts of his kingdom?
  • What can the spread of the legend in a given century tell us about the global concerns of medieval and early modern Europeans?

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