Imaginary Cartographies
, by Smail, Daniel LordNote: Supplemental materials are not guaranteed with Rental or Used book purchases.
- ISBN: 9780801436260 | 0801436265
- Cover: Hardcover
- Copyright: 12/1/1999
How, in the years before the advent of urban maps, did city residents conceptualize and navigate their communities? In bas strikingly original book, Daniel Lord Smail develops a new method and a new vocabulary for understanding how urban men and women thought about their personal geography. His thorough research of property records of late medieval Marseille leads him to conclude that its inhabitants charted their city, its social structure, and their own identities within that structure through a set of cartographic grammars which powerfully shaped their lives.
Prior to the fourteenth century, different interest groups -- notaries, royal officials, church officials, artisans -- developed their own cartographies in accordance with their own social, political, or administrative agendas. These competing templates were created around units ranging from streets and islands to vicinities and landmarks. Smail shows how the notarial template, which privileged the street as the most basic marker of address, gradually emerged as the cartographic norm. This transformat