Imagined Geographies and the Production of Space in Occitania and Northern Catalunya in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries.

medieval southern France;Occitania;Catalunya;Catalonia;urban space;Aragon;Kingdom of Mallorca;History (General);Humanities (General);Religious Studies;Romance Languages and Literature;West European Studies;Humanities;History

Farr, Jonathan C.Fancy, Hussein ;

University of Michigan

关键词: medieval southern France;    Occitania;    Catalunya;    Catalonia;    urban space;    Aragon;    Kingdom of Mallorca;    History (General);    Humanities (General);    Religious Studies;    Romance Languages and Literature;    West European Studies;    Humanities;    History;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/133422/jcfarr_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

In this dissertation, I examine the material and cognitive production of new medieval spaces—urban, seigneurial, and mendicant—in Occitania and northern Catalunya in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In a period of massive social, political, religious, and cultural transformations, inhabitants of this region articulated and contested new identities and the imagined geographies that sustained them. They built new material spaces that structured experience in ways that contributed to articulations of identity, influenced religious practices, and expressed or mediated authority. While the history of southern France in this period is usually seen as one of conflict and conquest, I argue that shared social, cultural, and spatial practices persisted across the centuries. I also contend that focusing on the way the material—objects and the built environment—functioned in these practices leads to new historical insights.I approach the spatial history of the region from three angles. First, I center on the world of the towns (namely, Narbonne, Toulouse, and Perpignan) to show how historical narratives allowed inhabitants to assert ancient Roman origins or claim a distinguished religious identity. These claims linked their pasts to extant or destroyed topographical landmarks, and I argue that medieval townspeople experienced that past not just through disembodied texts and legends but also materially, corporeally, in spatial practices. As consular governments of the towns began to monopolize documentary production, spaces of authority and authenticity that emanated from the figure of the notary came to be embedded in town halls and municipal cartularies. Second, I argue that these same documentary practices were adopted by lords and kings in order to assert and project their authority alongside the enquêtes, castles, and bastides that did likewise. Finally, I demonstrate how the new Dominican religious order, in the course of establishing convents and the networks of patronage that supported them, created, appropriated, or reoriented sacred landscapes and their associated imagined geographies, generating new identities for themselves and their patrons. In all these analyses, the material emerges as a constituent element, and I therefore locate authority, identity, and agency in a web of relations between people and things.