Description
Book SynopsisHow, in the years before the advent of urban maps, did city residents conceptualize and navigate their communities? In his strikingly original book, Daniel Lord Smail develops a new method and a new vocabulary for understanding how urban men and women...
Trade ReviewThis book makes a lively and original contribution to current debates on state development.
-- Karl Appuhn, Columbia University * Sixteenth Century Journal *
In this interesting and thought-provoking work, Daniel Smail concludes that the emergence of the street as the normal cartographic marker led first to the development of urban maps, and finally to the process of attaching street addresses to citizens.... Smail's work is scholarly and is highly recommended.
-- A.G. Traver * History: Reviews of New Books *
This book is elegantly written, and it is a pleasure to follow its argument through learned forays into topics ranging from cognitive psychology to cartography.... This is an ambitious book, filled with ideas that will stimulate researchers to look much more closely at records that they may have taken for granted.
-- John Drendel, Universite du Quebec * Speculum *
Imaginary Cartographies is a masterful case study of the relationship between spatial representation and the emergence of identity in late medieval and early modern Marseille. Through exhaustive archival and theoretical research, Smail explores the ways in which notorial records refer to an individual's relationship to the territory, thereby revealing the emergence of the notion of personal and national identity.... The author's convincing argument allows his readers to rethink not only how identity was articulated in the late medieval and early modern period, but also how both visual and linguistic spatial representations intersect in an emergent national imagination. The scope of Smail's work will appeal across lines of discipline as this book... lays out a solid methodological approach, navigating smoothly between the theoretical and the archival.
-- Elisabeth Hodges * Mapline *
This is an important work, establishing a methodology and analytical framework that I hope will inspire studies of these questions of language, perception, and statecraft elsewhere, including the other towns of Provence and cities in the north that were little affectd by the culture of the public notaries.
-- David Nicholas, Clemson University * American Historical Review *
