Abstract

This chapter analyses the circular plan of Jerusalem in Peter of Poitiers' Compendium historiae in genealogia Christi, a synopsis of history widely disseminated and frequently adapted. The plan of Jerusalem reveals how Peter of Poitiers modified and fused different sources, including Peter Comestor's Historia scholastica, to create a visually persuasive image of perfect formal and social order, with six gates foreshadowing the twelve gates of the Heavenly Jerusalem. The visual alignment of the plan of Jerusalem and other diagrams in the Compendium prompts the beholder to reflect on analogies of structures and events, and thus on the order and meaning of history. This argument extends to the late fifteenth-century diagram of the heavenly Jerusalem in Werner Rolewinck's Fasciculus temporum, which functions at the same time as a visualization of the Creed and as an allegorical image of the church, predetermined and eternal.