Smail, Daniel Lord. Imaginary Cartographies: Possession and Identity in Late Medieval Marseille. Ithaca, NY & London: Cornell University Press, 1999. 256 p., 9 plates. ISBN 0-8014-3626-5, $37.50.

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.

By examining land ownership, territorial division, and the origins of how individuals have been linked to specific spaces in the urban environment, this book demonstrates how the use of cartography in certain notorial practices plays a determinate role in the development of standard cartographic practices, as well as the construction of a nascent local and national imaginary. Smail’s research on these notorial practices reveals the graphic and linguistic methods by which people conceived of their relationship to the land, and how the location of the self within a territory reveals a certain personal relationship to that space. Smail establishes four predominant cartographic referents used in notorial practices for indicating an individual’s relationship to the city of Marseille: divisions of streets, insulae (the term for city blocks in the Latin cartography of the time), the lines of vicinities, and vernacular landmarks. Although modern urban city plans eventually privileged lines of division determined by streets, Smail’s analyses of these four concurrent traditions links relational practices to a larger sociology of identity and demonstrates how social memory emerges from the medieval archive (28).

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 engages current theoretical debates about the relationship of language and space to national identity, and lays out a solid methodological approach, navigating smoothly between the theoretical and the archival.

Elisabeth Hodges
Harvard University