Discussion

Many thanks for letting me know about your website. Indeed you have some very interesting thoughts and ideas about the different types of medieval labyrinth designs, and I will certainly be adding a link to your website to the links pages on www.labyrinthos.net which are currently being rebuilt, as the old structure of our links pages - first put on the internet in 1998 had become very outdated and difficult to use. Thanks for adding a link to our site.

A couple of points: I notice that you refer to the original labyrinth design as the "Cretan" type. I really do not like that term, and while you correctly point out that labyrinths are much older than the coins from Crete, I far prefer to call this labyrinth the "Classical" form - as it is the original labyrinth design. You may have read the labyrinth typology article on our website - it is also reproduced on the World-Wide Labyrinth Locator website - where I give my thoughts on what different types of labyrinths should be called. Apart from that I applaud your classification and discussion of different labyrinth types.

I am not so sure that Roman labyrinth designs on floor mosaics were so influential in the development of the medieval forms. After all, nearly all of them were destroyed or buried at the time of the 9th and 10th centuries when the first of the new medieval labyrinths started to appear. With the possible exception of the example in Algeria, none of the Roman examples would have been available for study at this time, and there is no evidence that manuscripts with these designs survived from the fall of the Roman empire and likewise they are practically unknown in subsequent Byzantine literature or mosaics.

The four-fold symbolism would have been an obvious imposition in any attempt to create a new labyrinth form, and the creation of 11 path labyrinths in the manuscript of Otfrid, c.871 CE (and the various copies of that), combined with the addition of the four-fold symmetry, would to my mind at any rate, be a far more logical route for the development of the medieval designs which became so widespread by the 12th and 13th centuries.

The existence of a number of labyrinth designs with anything from 6 to 12 pathways in manuscripts around the 10th and 11th centuries might suggest that there was a number of quite independent attempts to create a new "Christian" labyrinth at this time, more suitable for use to illustrate Christian philosophy and thinking.

Ultimately I guess we will never know, as none of the scribes or priests that created these labyrinths recorded the details of their thinking on this matter, simply inscribed their labyrinths in the margins and left it at that!

I trust we might have more of these discussions and I would very much like to know more about your books on the subject. Have you seen my "Labyrinths & Mazes" published 2003 by Lark Books in New York? Chapter 3 has some discussion of the origins of medieval labyrinth designs and of course many photos and illustrations of both the surviving and destroyed but documented examples, including quite a few not previously published, other that in our journal Caerdroia.

You say "I am not so sure..."

of course, neither am I, but I am satisfied that my ideas be considered as alternative hypotheses subject to discussion and eventually acceptance or rejection, but I think more probably, modification and refinement, and inclusion as part of the generally accepted knowledge.