It started off as a mundane romantic impulse—a series of bad clichés, really. That is, I wanted to lay the world at my partner's feet. Christmas was coming up; we were in graduate school. How do you say, "I think the world of you" in twenty dollars or less?: A Map of the World!

Maps put the mundus into mundane. They make a miniature of the mundus so that you can hold the world in your hand. The Latin etymology of map derives from the term mappa, which, in the ancient world, denoted a piece of cloth used as a towel or a napkin or a starter signal at the races in the Circus Maximus. Keep in mind that our term chart comes from the Latin charta, originally a leaf of Egyptian papyrus and, metonymically, the writing on it. Later, the medieval combination term mappa mundi eventually drops the mundi that describes the mappa as it switches form for content and leads to our modern English term. And the term is indeed modern at its core, not having entered the English language in print until 1589, when Richard Hakluyt describes the need for "a bigger and better mappe" in his Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation.

Paradoxically, the etymological history of these terms demonstrates how the very worldly nature of maps, especially as a possession of the worldly elite, contains the impulse for an otherworldly perspective. The classical Latin term mundanus, denotatively means "belonging to the world," (versus "belonging to heaven or God") and connotatively implies "cosmopolitan"—belonging to the world as a whole rather than a particular city, town or village. Its first printed appearance in the English language, along with the connotation of "daily or normal," comes in 1475, when the Book of Noblesse contends that "fortune and felicite mondeyne was joyned and knyt withe his vertue and noblesse roiall." The perspective on a map, however, gazes godlike from above, high above the world it observes. Note how the early 14th-century Hereford Mappa Mundi, a classic "T-O" map, places Jerusalem in the middle and east at the top, and surrounds the whole with a band of blue sea, in order to represent the medieval Catholic theological understanding of the world, which Geoffrey Chaucer calls, a "litel spot of erthe that with the se / Embraced is" (Troilus and Criseyde V.1815-1816). I might add that the term "atlas" derives from the mythological Greek Titan, Atlas, who held the world on his shoulders.

Thus, with the gift of a map, I would put the world into the hands of my darling love. The atlas I bought for $13.95 was published by Harper-Collins in 1997. My inscription reads, "To help you plot and plan the new world order—your co-conspirator." It turns out that godhood probably costs more than $13.95, however, since the world order has managed to renew itself several times since I bought the atlas, without consulting either one of us. So much for our conspiracy.

As our medieval forbears warned us, sic fugit gloria mundi. Like the east facing, Catholic "T-O" maps, the exotic looking, south facing, 12th-century map by Al-Idrisi reminds us that the world order has never been as stable as any map implied. Like the T-O Mappa Mundi, Al-Idrisi's topsy-turvy map just looks wrong to us. Maps can disorient us.

Our current maps of the world, based on the Mercator projection, also have a shifty history. Named after Gerardus Mercator, the leading cartographer of the mid-16th century, these are the cylindrical conformal projection maps that we all recognize and which sailors and airline pilots still use for navigational purposes. They show the shapes of the land masses as they appear on a globe. However, in doing so, they distort the sizes of said land masses. You cannot simultaneously represent three-dimensional shape and size on a two-dimensional surface. The Peters Projection, an area accurate map by Arno Peters (1974), still under hot debate, attempts to counteract the Eurocentric bias implicit in Mercator's design. The Mercator projection does, after all, make Europe, which is 3.8 million square miles, look bigger than South America, which, at 6.9 million square miles, is actually almost twice as big. Furthermore, on a Mercator map, Greenland, which is 0.8 million square miles, appears to be a bit larger than Africa, which is 11.6 million square miles—actually 14.5 times larger.

All maps are historical. And history, as we know, is a branch of rhetoric. Maps only capture a momentary glimpse of the turning world with a particular argument contained in the vision. Although we turn to maps to give us a picture of the world, they often rather give us a picture of ourselves and how we see ourselves in the world. Although we trust them as a scientific view of an objective, unchanging state of physical geography, in truth, maps only reflect the fantasies, fictions and ambitions of what a particular time and ideology thought the world ought to be. On a mundane map, orbis non sufficit.

Krista Sue-Lo Twu is an Assistant Professor of English specializing in Medieval Studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Her article titled "The Awntyrs off Arthure: Reliquary for Romance," is forthcoming in Arthurian Literature.