The medieval world is as complex as its strata and layers, its visible and invisible spaces. Vision, hearing, and touch are manifested in all their intense corporality and spirituality. The medieval terrae incognitae form the borders of that which is mysterious and sometimes monstrous, where one dreams or travels, where fantastic phenomena occur, and where the heroes of the stories achieve glory or death. These imaginary and borderline geographic spaces, like the seas, the forests, or visions, are traversed by the magnetic attraction of darkness and night. The night, the darkness of the sky, but also of the soul, cannot but become a geography to discover, explore, or fear. The night and the sky trigger the fascination for the stars and their hidden message, the signs to guide one in the darkness or to navigate distant seas. Monsters, mysterious islands, nocturnal beings and creatures that inhabit the limits of the known world, wonders and fantasies that exist in a geography that expands the limits of the visible into the space of the invisible. Because the medieval world is an expanded world; a world in which phenomena such as teleportation or the bilocation of dreams and visions, of the besieged soul, set on fire or precipitated into darkness, appear.

The night is also a liminal space, a category widely developed in the Middle Ages and which allows us to better understand what this experience of limits was like. Borders, places of transition, change, and transformation define to a large extent the feeling of this period. Both in the most prosaic gestures - the construction of sanctuaries at jurisdictional boundaries - and in the most elevated experiences - the journeys of the Christian soul in search of union with divinity - a magical geography is developed in which the threshold delimits and unites both spheres of reality. The night, in this sense, is presented as a powerful metaphor for these multiple moments of transition: night of the soul in search of divine light - starting from darkness as a challenge that the soul must face to reach enlightenment; dark night in which the most earthly forces of evil emerge - bandits, thieves, or outcasts of all kinds; and also the night in which dreams display all their power. The sea, the forest, the temple, hell or the night are thus worlds different from the everyday ones with their own spatial and temporal dimensions, with their thresholds and limits. Other worlds that inhabit and breathe within the real world, expanding it. Worlds with their own coordinates where both the religious – who can move to visualized spaces, be it hell or heaven – and travelers, walkers, geographers or sailors, throw themselves into unknown spaces beyond the perceptible and palpable; other worlds that, through their own symbols and signs, languages ​​and forms, await those who are capable of deciphering them.