Space and Place in Medieval Contexts

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Since Henri Lefebvre published his magisterial tome, The Social Production of Space, in 1958, medievalists and others have come to incorporate space as a central theme in medieval history, literature, art, science, and philosophy. For medievalists in particular, Lefebvre's work might be seen to be foundational, as he understood the very idea of space to be historically linked to the transformation of the European west through Christianization and through the increasing urbanization of the European landscape. Lefebvre believed that space could be separated into three categories or types - social space, physical space, and mental space. He argued that social space was produced by various economic and political means; that physical space was empty or void; and that mental space was entirely abstract. Lefebvre's ideas on space were driven in part by a Marxist approach to the urbanization of the European landscape; he understood the 'commercial revolution' of the high Middle Ages to be a sort of precursor to a more intrusive form of capitalism which marked out urban space as a 'tool of terrifying power'.¹ Although Lefebvre's characterization of the medieval urban landscape has been significantly nuanced in recent years, his overall insistence that historical change can be tracked through spatial understandings and forms has continued to stimulate what has come to be known as 'the spatial turn' in histories of the premodern world.

Before tracing some of the particularities of medieval understandings of space and place, it is important to consider what is meant by this rather nebulous term 'space'. Over the last thirty years, significant theoretical and individual cultural, geographical, and anthropological studies have sought to answer that question, and in so doing, provided a set of frameworks in which historical contexts might usefully be explored. These frameworks can be categorized in three ways. First, space may be understood as a means by which people locate themselves in their immediate and eschatological surrounds. In this sense, space might be thought of as an idea or a concept that denotes various systems of self and collective identification. Thus, space has an abstract, conceptual essence relating to, but independent from, mere geographical dimension.

Second, space is continually generated and shaped by action, by movement, by use. This means that space is dynamic and fluid, and not always demarcated by fixed material or imagined boundaries. For Michel de Certeau for instance, space is the 'intersection of mobile elements', while other scholars have used the term 'place' to describe the particular construction of 'practised' space.² Geographer Doreen Massey argued that places are processes created by the connections between peoples and their bigger geographies. Places are made by use, by imaginings, by travel, and so on. Every place is unique because the things that make it are so. In fact, Massey says that we cannot understand place by enclosing it in boundaries; we need to look outwards from location to discover all the networks, the histories, the relationships, and peoples who have passed in and out of a location, building it in materials, imaginings, and memory as a place.³ Massey makes the same point about space: space itself is something that is made by connections, is a continual process, and signifies multiple meanings.⁴ She imagines space as a 'simultaneity of stories-so-far', while places might be characterized as 'collections of those stories, articulations within the wider power-geometries of space'.⁵

Third, space can be used as one of the analytical instruments we possess to think historically. Indeed, it is possible to consider space in the same way that Joan Scott famously delineated gender as a category of historical analysis. This is because space, like gender, signifies a wide range of concepts and ideas: as I have sketched above, space might be abstract, material, performed, and imagined. This diversity of meaning allows for bigger historical questions to be posed - even the same questions that Scott asked of gender. How does space shed light on the workings of human social relationships? How might space give meaning to the organization and perception of historical knowledge? Further, using space as an analytical...