Locating the Middle Ages: The Spaces and Places of Medieval Culture ed. by Julian Weiss, Sarah Salih (review)

In sixteen essays, this edited volume of cultural geography displays a variety of creative insights and approaches to places and spaces both historical and fictive. The editors’ Introduction cites Doreen Massey’s For Space as providing key affinities connecting the essays. Massey sees space as 1) the product of interrelations as constituted by interactions; 2) the “sphere of possibility . . . of contemporaneous plurality” that produces such interrelations; and 3) “a simultaneity of stories-so-far” (p. xxii) always under construction. However, sections entitled “World Spaces,” “Empires and Frontiers,” “Cities and Power, Sacred and Secular,” and “Courts and Castles” do nothing to break out of older categories of thought, and the last section can (wrongly) look tacked on because it has nothing to do with scale but with “Rewriting Place.” Thus Massey’s expansive theoretical perspectives clash with the book’s organization by scale rather than by, say, the Introduction’s more creative imaginings of how the essays interact, and no one comments on why size matters. Perhaps the conference panels that generated the papers were allowed to override new ways of creating the space of the volume itself. Nevertheless, the collection is well worth reading and provides a number of challenging re-visions.

“World Spaces” deals with ways of seeing and theorizing the geocultural. Richard Talbert argues that the narrow, twenty-two-foot-long map of the Roman world, copied ca. 1200 and known as Peutinger’s Map, represents a “pivotal moment of transition from classical to medieval cartography” (p. 13). He shows that the original was most probably displayed in a chamber of imperial power, with Rome depicted at the center, perhaps behind a central seat, and thus mapping the ideology of empire and its influences as a panoptic view. Paul Freedman follows by defining the exotic not as the binary of the familiar but as both seductive and disorienting. With specific contexts for travelers and trade, Freedman asks us to distinguish between inherited, learned information and the practical abilities of travelers to make their own observations: Europe “participated in rather than controlled a discourse about the exotic, and did not have a monopoly on ideas about the wealth of the East” (p. 26). He finishes with how India, once imagined as at the world’s edge, moves to a more accurate placement, while Paradise recedes from earthly to inaccessible and static: from its vantage point, the secular world becomes the real world of the exotic. Rounding out the section, Sharon Kinoshita considers “strategic regionalism” instead of nations or origins (p. 39), laying out a methodology for new cognitive mappings of the Mediterranean. Ways of conceiving include contact and circulation, changing exploitations of landscape, and connectivity or networks, studies in, not just of, the region. Reconceptualizing the Mediterranean as a region of contacts and networks, she applies her methods to the Persian Vis and Ramin. Accepting that its well-known resemblance to the Tristan and Isolde story could in fact mark it as a source, she indicates how the Turks who conquer Iran create Persian as a Mediterranean language that ends up in Seljuk Syria and Anatolia.

“Empires and Frontiers” begins with Luke Sunderland’s important rehabilitation of Franco-Italian epics, in particular L’Entrée d’Espagne. He outlines competing imperialisms, one cultural and figured in Roland’s multilingualism, and one military, shown in Charlemagne’s Spanish campaigns. Using Derrida’s points that no language is native or natural and that all culture is colonial, Sunderland suggests that we imitate Roland, translating the Middle Ages without asserting our sovereignty over them: “[W]e might travel to the location of medieval culture” (p. 64). The other two essays in this section, the longest and shortest of the book, are by the volume’s editors. Julian Weiss...