Review

General Books

In Imagined Cartographies, an imaginative work of micro-history, Daniel Smail has developed a concept of mental or linguistic maps that describe how the citizens of medieval Marseille viewed their place in their city. He goes on to develop two hypotheses: first that the medieval residents viewed their world as knots of residential sociability or centers of production--both described as 'vicinities'--and then that this mental map changed over time to one of streets and addresses. Smail's analysis of the shifting mental map of Marseille is significant both in terms of showing decentralized power and in explaining the changing views of urban inhabitants. The difficulty in his narrow approach lies in extrapolating these findings to other parts of Europe where urban political and legal cultures were sufficiently different and therefore demand a separate analysis. However Smail has come up with original questions to ask, and his linguistic cartography offers a potentially new way of looking at changing mentalities in the Late Middle Ages.	1
Smail identifies three different linguistic maps of the city. In the first stages the bishop or king tended to own entire insula (blocks), so it was logical that tenants would be identified as living in each particular insula. However few residents appeared to incorporate such paradigms into their own views. What is evident is that under the combined rejection of both citizens and notaries insulae of this kind disappeared fairly rapidly as defined places. Some of Smail's most compelling arguments are contained in his chapter on vernacular cartography. Where Smail is able to use more limited non-notarial records made by townsmen, he shows the broad use of vicinities throughout the community. Thus we may find reference to a "neighborhood of cobblers" on one hand, or a quarter "near the fountain" on the other. It is a very personal and intimate world that Smail describes. However, the localized vernacular was slowly changed by notaries, whom Smail sees as an ongoing professional class that persisted in the south of France and Italy as a holdover from late antiquity. These notaries interacted with all the communities in Marseille and thus needed to mediate between different "communities of knowledge." From this intermediary role, notaries developed a universal set of references, streets, that could be used in any land transaction regardless of the differing vernacular cartographies of diverse urban communities. Smail emphasizes that notaries navigated around the entire town and thus, as individuals, became acclimatized to streets as thoroughfares and to maps. Under these perambulatory circumstances their mental maps grew apart from the parochial vernacular view of neighborhood and landmark. Eventually the notaries developed their universal language based on a street grid system and, by the sixteenth century, this had become the predominant descriptive tool of the urban environment.	2
Smail counters previously held views that the mapping by street was a tool of early-modern government for control and power. Instead Smail convincingly shows that the change in mapping came about largely due to the predominance of the professional notarial class. Additionally he dismisses prior concepts of the Middle Ages as primitive and lacking interest in centralization. For Smail the medieval map was linguistic rather than graphic, and thus useful in context, and--here is where Smail makes some of his most interesting and far reaching arguments--a person's domicile was not a part of his/her identity. Smail finds few fixed standards of identity in the Middle Ages, claiming most individuals were classified in social memory; while the later development of bureaucracies involved the development of more rigid identities. More modern, global notions of identity stem from the requirement for a rationalized central record system to replace "context-based identities" with "transcendent categories." Perhaps Smail's idea of changing identity is best illustrated with an example. A person in the thirteenth century might be described as "Antoni the cobbler, a good and honest man, living near the Old Market," compared to someone in an industrialized society who would be described as " John Smith, 1212 Main Street, Long Beach, Caucasian, male, aged 45." Smail's conclusion, therefore, that address became part of identity is a good one. His conclusions are reinforced by his use of maps. Essentially the traditional medieval urban map lacks streets; it is all buildings and landmarks squeezed inside the circuit walls. But by the sixteenth century, with the notarial paradigm in dominance, the town is portrayed with individual buildings and distinct landmarks amidst a clear network of streets. Then, by the eighteenth century, the buildings are completely depersonalized into shaded zones and the map becomes the street map we are so familiar with.	3
For teachers, Smail's book is a boon in several different ways. Undergraduates may benefit from observing such close work with primary sources as well as gain insight on late medieval mentalities. Although secondary teachers may be less willing to assign such a technical book, Smail's ideas prompt the use of written or drawn classroom mapping exercises for students to describe their city both with, and without, landmarks or streets. Such activities may prove useful in offering differing ways of imagining the urban environment.	4
California State University, Long Beach Donald Leech

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