- Email: [email protected]
Mapping the Medieval City: Space, Place and Identity in Chester c. 1200–1600
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 46 (2014) 113e136
The authors are close friends who have collaborated for over three decades. Lovell, a geographer, two historians (Lutz and Kramer), and an archeologist (Swezey) are the unquestioned experts on the short- and long-term consequences of the encounters between Spaniards and native populations in Guatemala. Swezey, who died years ago, is memorialized with a dedication. If you know something of these scholars, you are aware that their contributions to Guatemalan and Central American research go far beyond this book. They are responsible in large part for the successes of the wonderful, but often threatened, preeminent research center in Antigua, Guatemala (CIRMA, Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica), for the highly respected journal, Mesoamérica, now in its 55th issue (1980e2013), and for many weighty publications. This book is organized chronologically into four sections, with fourteen chapters, plus a conclusion. The major themes are 1) conquest and resistance, 2) settlement and colonization, 3) labor and tribute, and 4) dynamics of Maya survival. Eight chapters (1 and 4e10) incorporate materials previously published and here reworked; six were prepared anew for this publication. The quality of workmanship required to put together such a book is clear. One can only imagine how the work load would be distributed. Who spent the thousands of hours in the archives, searching and sifting through the piles of smelly old papers? Who did the months of meticulous and eye-blurring paleography? And then there are the seemingly endless transcriptions, translations, interpretations, reorganizations, and re-writings. Those familiar with the art of this type of historical geography know this is a slow and difficult, but an eventually rewarding, enterprise. There are at least eight important ‘take-away’ points from the volume. First, the authors frequently remind us of the importance of interpreting the so-called facts of colonial history. Mostly we have to rely on the words and biases of the conquerors. To get around this limitation, the authors frequently use the Kaqchikel (Maya) chronicle, Memorial de Sololá, to verify or counter the Spanish accounts. Second, they are irreverent towards nationalist historians who endlessly repeat the imagined stories of a glorious indigenous leader. The case of Tecún Umán comes to mind. The legendary K’iche’ leader, it is oft said, ‘died in hand-to-hand combat with Pedro Alvarado.’ Is this not a story just too good to be true? Should the documentary record be allowed to be distorted for nationalist reasons? Who gets to decide? Neighboring Honduras has a similar problem with its Lempira; Nicaragua has its Nicarao. Third, the authors break down another sacrilege (discovered by Kramer): Jorge Alvarado did a better job of securing Guatemala than did his ‘ruthless and feared’ older brother, Pedro. Fourth, the volume refutes the notion that the municipio was the most important social-economic unit in much of Central America by showing the importance of analyzing even smaller preceding colonial units e congregación, parcialidad, encomienda, and pueblos de indios. In so doing the book illustrates the value of case studies. For example, the municipality of Sacapulas illustrates how modern settlements retain their earlier spatial loyalties, while evolving through the territorial units just mentioned. Fifth, the authors show that the ‘Ladino east-Indian west’ regionalization of colonial Guatemala proposed by historian Murdo Macleod is better re-formed into an ‘Indian north-Ladino south’ dichotomy. This comes after the authors constructed a coreperiphery map based on ethnicity, elevation, and aspects of the colonial economy. Sixth, the study highlights four important colonial administrators (Maldonado, Marroquin, Cerrato, and Valverde) to critically evaluate their roles in calculating Indian tribute and, hence, populations. Seventh, the authors employ a dense set of documents to calculate that the nadir of the indigenous population was reached
133
about 1624, a bit earlier than is often reported for Latin America as a whole. Eighth, the final chapter reconstructs the slow recovery of indigenous population into the nineteenth century based on seventeen documents from which population figures can be gleaned. And yes, perhaps surprisingly, Guatemala’s indigenous populous today is perhaps 35e40 times larger than it was in 1624. Finally, exhaustive end materials e including an invaluable appendix of 40 tables (mostly on demographics and tribute), a useful glossary, and a bibliography of 310 citations, eleven per cent of which are from the authors’ own publications e will greatly facilitate further investigations. To note any real criticisms is difficult. A couple of the chapters are less readable than the others. Perhaps understandably the flow seems better in those that were re-worked. Also, for readers unfamiliar with the geography of early Guatemala a first chapter map locating the K’iche’ and Kaqchikel capitals of Utatlán and Iximché would be helpful. The sections of thick detail make for harder reading, but it is also the grit that deeply committed specialists will relish the most. To conclude, this book is a tour de force of raw scholarship that covers the bases, discusses both sides of conflicted issues, inserts penetrating historiography, and considers a massive amount of primary documents and secondary materials. Thorough is the word that comes readily to mind. I cannot imagine that much more can be written on the subject. Overall, the book stands as an encouraging testament to what can be accomplished when friends work together. William V. Davidson Louisiana State University, USA http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.07.024
Catherine A.M. Clarke (Ed), Mapping the Medieval City: Space, Place and Identity in Chester c. 1200e1600. Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2011, 244 pages, US$30 paperback. Mapping the Medieval City, edited by Catherine A. M. Clarke, and its companion web sites also directed by Clarke e the scholarly Mapping Medieval Chester (www.medievalchester.ac.uk) and the publicoriented Discover Medieval Chester (discover.medievalchester.ac.uk) e are models of focused multidisciplinary collaboration, either on a single end product (as in the web sites) or on a compilation of methods, sources, and disciplinary perspectives, as in the essay collection. They are also a happy marriage of traditional print scholarship and digital media, each providing a different way of accessing and analyzing text and data. As Clarke writes in her introduction, ‘Just as the city is a place of difference and diversity, so the essays in this volume seek to understand medieval Chester in a variety of different ways. these essays offer vantage points over the city which inevitably reflect our own specific interests in the medieval past, our own sites of imaginative engagement and our own critical, theoretical and ideological priorities’ (p. 12). Yet, despite that diversity, recurring themes run through the collection, particularly the formation of ideas of center/periphery and region/ nation, WelsheEnglish relations, the formation and representations of boundaries and borders, the subjective perception and creation of space and identity, and the overlapping and intersubjective means (and meanings) of ‘mapping’ e visual and textual, literal and figurative. Though the contributors to the collection come from historical geography, literary studies, and history, and
134
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 46 (2014) 113e136
though they focus on a varied range of visual and textual genres and objects, they nevertheless speak to and illuminate each other. The collection as a whole should be useful to anyone interested in historical space, place, and identity, especially scholars interested in medieval and early modern urban and/or border spaces, or looking for models for their own large-scale multidisciplinary projects. Of most immediate use to the historical geographer is Keith D. Lilley’s ‘Urban Mappings: Visualizing Late Medieval Chester in Cartographic and Textual Form,’ the core content of which is also reproduced on the Mapping Medieval Chester web site. In this article, Lilley elucidates the methods, processes, and challenges of creating an interactive digital map of medieval Chester from postmedieval cartography and from textual sources with an often figurative bent. Here the specialist will find the theoretical and methodological issues and practical challenges that a historical geographer faces in trying to map medieval cities, and the technological processes employed, but presented in a way that a nonspecialist can also understand. Indeed, Lilley’s article rightfully stands at the head of the collection not only because he is the sole geographer engaging actual maps in the collection, but also because he takes up the issue of the many meanings of ‘mapping’ and their usefulness across disciplines: ‘Combining visual and textual material through the medium of mapping, both literal and metaphoric, provides a rich and lucrative avenue for medieval studies not just in literary history but in historical cartography and geography too’ (p. 20). Moreover, the digital maps that Lilley created e available on the Mapping Medieval Chester web site, where one can also download raw GIS data e will no doubt be useful for scores of scholars of medieval Chester. I, for one, foresee myself directing students to the maps, and perhaps designing an assignment around them, when I next teach the medieval Chester ‘Whitsun Plays’. Though Lilley’s article is the only one written by a geographer, other articles in the collection and the primary texts curated on the web site should nevertheless be useful to others in historical/cultural geography with interests in the medieval to early modern British world. Especially notable in this collection is the number of articles that address EnglisheWelsh relations in and around Chester, using historical data and literary texts both English and Welsh. The three articles that explicitly take up this subject provide three very different approaches. Helen Fulton’s ‘The Outside Within: Medieval Chester and North Wales as a Social Space’ uses Welsh-language poetry about the city to show that the Welsh viewed Chester as a shared social space, but one understood differently by each group. (Electronic editions of these poems with facing translations e edited and translated by Fulton e can be found on the Mapping Medieval Chester site.) Fulton argues that the Welsh evidence suggests that their use of the space of the city was even ‘transgressive of the English hegemonic order’ (p. 149). Jane Laughton’s ‘Mapping the Migrants: Welsh, Manx and Irish Settlers in fifteenth-century Chester,’ works in concert with that claim, showing that Welsh immigrants sometimes rose to elite levels of power, even during the years of the Glyndwr rebellion and the feuds that divided the city. But as Rob W. Barrett, Jr. shows in his reading of the English literary evidence in ‘Leeks for Livery: Consuming Welsh Difference in the Chester Shepherd’s Play,’ while individual Welsh denizens of Chester may have held positions of prestige, ethnic relations between the English and Welsh in the period and the English attitude to Chester’s porous borders might better be characterized as ambivalent. Many other essays in the collection work in equally rich and productive sequence. C. P. Lewis’s ‘Framing Medieval Chester: the Landscape of Urban Boundaries,’ which presents the historical evidence for both physical and jurisdictional boundaries in the city,
follows nicely after Lilley’s article on the process of creating the digital map (to which Lewis then refers readers in his notes). John Doran’s ‘St Werburgh’s, St John’s and the Liber Luciani De Laude Cestri’ and Mark Faulkner’s ‘The Spatial Hermeneutics of Lucian’s De Laude Cestri’ both take up the monk Lucian’s encomium to the city (a translation of which, by Mark Faulkner, can be found on the Mapping Medieval Chester site). Doran analyzes the text for its responses to local politics, while Faulkner explores the representation of space in the text through Lucian’s itineraries as he describes himself walking through the city. Liz Herbert McAvoy’s essay, ‘Ie beoð þe ancren of Englond. as þah ie weren an cuuent of. Chester: Liminal Spaces and the Anchoritic life in Medieval Chester,’ also takes up De Laude Cestri, along with other literary works and documentary evidence, to show how the hybridized, liminal space of this city on the border with Wales was also a feminized space. In addressing both the De Laude Cestri and anchoritic life, McAvoy’s essay serves as a transition between the previous two essays and Laura Varnam’s ‘Sanctity and the City: Sacred Space in Henry Bradshaw’s Life of St Werburge,’ which forms a sequence on Bradshaw’s text (again, available on the Mapping Medieval Chester site) with Cynthia Turner Camp’s ‘Plotting Chester on the national Map: Richard Pynson’s 1521 printing of Henry Bradshaw’s Life of St Werburge.’ These two articles are perhaps less about space and mapping the way geographers might think about those terms than other articles in the volume, but they might mesh well with what Lilley identifies as geography’s ‘linguistic turn’ (p. 19). Varnam takes up the spatial imagery of Bradshaw’s text, while Camp shows the ways in which a decidedly regional text was reoriented in its London printing for a cosmopolitan, national audience. Clarke has organized an impressive multidisciplinary collection that also works well as a whole. Along with the Mapping Medieval Chester web site she has created a resource that will be of use to a range of scholars and students, and a scholarly project that serves as a model for others in its clarity of purpose and range of applications. Christina M. Fitzgerald The University of Toledo, USA http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.07.017
Steven Hoelscher (Ed), Reading Magnum: A Visual Archive of the Modern World. Austin, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas Press, 2013, 352 pages, US$50.25 hardcover. ‘In December of 2009, a collection of 200,000 photographs, known at that time as the Magnum archive, was moved from the Magnum Photos office in New York City to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin’ (p. 17). So begins Alison Nordström’s contribution to this magnificent book of essays concerned with the making and re-making of one of the most significant collections in the history of photojournalism. The move from New York to Austin completed the transition from working photo library to treasured archive that had begun some years earlier with the turn to digital. The physical form of the collection e ‘folders of dog-eared, labeled, and written upon prints’ as Nordstrom puts it e reveals much about the business model that Magnum had operated since its foundation in 1947, in which photographers joined together to create what effectively was an image lending library, whose function was to sell their work to different newspapers, magazines and book publishers
ˇ
The authors are close friends who have collaborated for over three decades. Lovell, a geographer, two historians (Lutz and Kramer), and an archeologist (Swezey) are the unquestioned experts on the short- and long-term consequences of the encounters between Spaniards and native populations in Guatemala. Swezey, who died years ago, is memorialized with a dedication. If you know something of these scholars, you are aware that their contributions to Guatemalan and Central American research go far beyond this book. They are responsible in large part for the successes of the wonderful, but often threatened, preeminent research center in Antigua, Guatemala (CIRMA, Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica), for the highly respected journal, Mesoamérica, now in its 55th issue (1980e2013), and for many weighty publications. This book is organized chronologically into four sections, with fourteen chapters, plus a conclusion. The major themes are 1) conquest and resistance, 2) settlement and colonization, 3) labor and tribute, and 4) dynamics of Maya survival. Eight chapters (1 and 4e10) incorporate materials previously published and here reworked; six were prepared anew for this publication. The quality of workmanship required to put together such a book is clear. One can only imagine how the work load would be distributed. Who spent the thousands of hours in the archives, searching and sifting through the piles of smelly old papers? Who did the months of meticulous and eye-blurring paleography? And then there are the seemingly endless transcriptions, translations, interpretations, reorganizations, and re-writings. Those familiar with the art of this type of historical geography know this is a slow and difficult, but an eventually rewarding, enterprise. There are at least eight important ‘take-away’ points from the volume. First, the authors frequently remind us of the importance of interpreting the so-called facts of colonial history. Mostly we have to rely on the words and biases of the conquerors. To get around this limitation, the authors frequently use the Kaqchikel (Maya) chronicle, Memorial de Sololá, to verify or counter the Spanish accounts. Second, they are irreverent towards nationalist historians who endlessly repeat the imagined stories of a glorious indigenous leader. The case of Tecún Umán comes to mind. The legendary K’iche’ leader, it is oft said, ‘died in hand-to-hand combat with Pedro Alvarado.’ Is this not a story just too good to be true? Should the documentary record be allowed to be distorted for nationalist reasons? Who gets to decide? Neighboring Honduras has a similar problem with its Lempira; Nicaragua has its Nicarao. Third, the authors break down another sacrilege (discovered by Kramer): Jorge Alvarado did a better job of securing Guatemala than did his ‘ruthless and feared’ older brother, Pedro. Fourth, the volume refutes the notion that the municipio was the most important social-economic unit in much of Central America by showing the importance of analyzing even smaller preceding colonial units e congregación, parcialidad, encomienda, and pueblos de indios. In so doing the book illustrates the value of case studies. For example, the municipality of Sacapulas illustrates how modern settlements retain their earlier spatial loyalties, while evolving through the territorial units just mentioned. Fifth, the authors show that the ‘Ladino east-Indian west’ regionalization of colonial Guatemala proposed by historian Murdo Macleod is better re-formed into an ‘Indian north-Ladino south’ dichotomy. This comes after the authors constructed a coreperiphery map based on ethnicity, elevation, and aspects of the colonial economy. Sixth, the study highlights four important colonial administrators (Maldonado, Marroquin, Cerrato, and Valverde) to critically evaluate their roles in calculating Indian tribute and, hence, populations. Seventh, the authors employ a dense set of documents to calculate that the nadir of the indigenous population was reached
133
about 1624, a bit earlier than is often reported for Latin America as a whole. Eighth, the final chapter reconstructs the slow recovery of indigenous population into the nineteenth century based on seventeen documents from which population figures can be gleaned. And yes, perhaps surprisingly, Guatemala’s indigenous populous today is perhaps 35e40 times larger than it was in 1624. Finally, exhaustive end materials e including an invaluable appendix of 40 tables (mostly on demographics and tribute), a useful glossary, and a bibliography of 310 citations, eleven per cent of which are from the authors’ own publications e will greatly facilitate further investigations. To note any real criticisms is difficult. A couple of the chapters are less readable than the others. Perhaps understandably the flow seems better in those that were re-worked. Also, for readers unfamiliar with the geography of early Guatemala a first chapter map locating the K’iche’ and Kaqchikel capitals of Utatlán and Iximché would be helpful. The sections of thick detail make for harder reading, but it is also the grit that deeply committed specialists will relish the most. To conclude, this book is a tour de force of raw scholarship that covers the bases, discusses both sides of conflicted issues, inserts penetrating historiography, and considers a massive amount of primary documents and secondary materials. Thorough is the word that comes readily to mind. I cannot imagine that much more can be written on the subject. Overall, the book stands as an encouraging testament to what can be accomplished when friends work together. William V. Davidson Louisiana State University, USA http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.07.024
Catherine A.M. Clarke (Ed), Mapping the Medieval City: Space, Place and Identity in Chester c. 1200e1600. Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2011, 244 pages, US$30 paperback. Mapping the Medieval City, edited by Catherine A. M. Clarke, and its companion web sites also directed by Clarke e the scholarly Mapping Medieval Chester (www.medievalchester.ac.uk) and the publicoriented Discover Medieval Chester (discover.medievalchester.ac.uk) e are models of focused multidisciplinary collaboration, either on a single end product (as in the web sites) or on a compilation of methods, sources, and disciplinary perspectives, as in the essay collection. They are also a happy marriage of traditional print scholarship and digital media, each providing a different way of accessing and analyzing text and data. As Clarke writes in her introduction, ‘Just as the city is a place of difference and diversity, so the essays in this volume seek to understand medieval Chester in a variety of different ways. these essays offer vantage points over the city which inevitably reflect our own specific interests in the medieval past, our own sites of imaginative engagement and our own critical, theoretical and ideological priorities’ (p. 12). Yet, despite that diversity, recurring themes run through the collection, particularly the formation of ideas of center/periphery and region/ nation, WelsheEnglish relations, the formation and representations of boundaries and borders, the subjective perception and creation of space and identity, and the overlapping and intersubjective means (and meanings) of ‘mapping’ e visual and textual, literal and figurative. Though the contributors to the collection come from historical geography, literary studies, and history, and
134
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 46 (2014) 113e136
though they focus on a varied range of visual and textual genres and objects, they nevertheless speak to and illuminate each other. The collection as a whole should be useful to anyone interested in historical space, place, and identity, especially scholars interested in medieval and early modern urban and/or border spaces, or looking for models for their own large-scale multidisciplinary projects. Of most immediate use to the historical geographer is Keith D. Lilley’s ‘Urban Mappings: Visualizing Late Medieval Chester in Cartographic and Textual Form,’ the core content of which is also reproduced on the Mapping Medieval Chester web site. In this article, Lilley elucidates the methods, processes, and challenges of creating an interactive digital map of medieval Chester from postmedieval cartography and from textual sources with an often figurative bent. Here the specialist will find the theoretical and methodological issues and practical challenges that a historical geographer faces in trying to map medieval cities, and the technological processes employed, but presented in a way that a nonspecialist can also understand. Indeed, Lilley’s article rightfully stands at the head of the collection not only because he is the sole geographer engaging actual maps in the collection, but also because he takes up the issue of the many meanings of ‘mapping’ and their usefulness across disciplines: ‘Combining visual and textual material through the medium of mapping, both literal and metaphoric, provides a rich and lucrative avenue for medieval studies not just in literary history but in historical cartography and geography too’ (p. 20). Moreover, the digital maps that Lilley created e available on the Mapping Medieval Chester web site, where one can also download raw GIS data e will no doubt be useful for scores of scholars of medieval Chester. I, for one, foresee myself directing students to the maps, and perhaps designing an assignment around them, when I next teach the medieval Chester ‘Whitsun Plays’. Though Lilley’s article is the only one written by a geographer, other articles in the collection and the primary texts curated on the web site should nevertheless be useful to others in historical/cultural geography with interests in the medieval to early modern British world. Especially notable in this collection is the number of articles that address EnglisheWelsh relations in and around Chester, using historical data and literary texts both English and Welsh. The three articles that explicitly take up this subject provide three very different approaches. Helen Fulton’s ‘The Outside Within: Medieval Chester and North Wales as a Social Space’ uses Welsh-language poetry about the city to show that the Welsh viewed Chester as a shared social space, but one understood differently by each group. (Electronic editions of these poems with facing translations e edited and translated by Fulton e can be found on the Mapping Medieval Chester site.) Fulton argues that the Welsh evidence suggests that their use of the space of the city was even ‘transgressive of the English hegemonic order’ (p. 149). Jane Laughton’s ‘Mapping the Migrants: Welsh, Manx and Irish Settlers in fifteenth-century Chester,’ works in concert with that claim, showing that Welsh immigrants sometimes rose to elite levels of power, even during the years of the Glyndwr rebellion and the feuds that divided the city. But as Rob W. Barrett, Jr. shows in his reading of the English literary evidence in ‘Leeks for Livery: Consuming Welsh Difference in the Chester Shepherd’s Play,’ while individual Welsh denizens of Chester may have held positions of prestige, ethnic relations between the English and Welsh in the period and the English attitude to Chester’s porous borders might better be characterized as ambivalent. Many other essays in the collection work in equally rich and productive sequence. C. P. Lewis’s ‘Framing Medieval Chester: the Landscape of Urban Boundaries,’ which presents the historical evidence for both physical and jurisdictional boundaries in the city,
follows nicely after Lilley’s article on the process of creating the digital map (to which Lewis then refers readers in his notes). John Doran’s ‘St Werburgh’s, St John’s and the Liber Luciani De Laude Cestri’ and Mark Faulkner’s ‘The Spatial Hermeneutics of Lucian’s De Laude Cestri’ both take up the monk Lucian’s encomium to the city (a translation of which, by Mark Faulkner, can be found on the Mapping Medieval Chester site). Doran analyzes the text for its responses to local politics, while Faulkner explores the representation of space in the text through Lucian’s itineraries as he describes himself walking through the city. Liz Herbert McAvoy’s essay, ‘Ie beoð þe ancren of Englond. as þah ie weren an cuuent of. Chester: Liminal Spaces and the Anchoritic life in Medieval Chester,’ also takes up De Laude Cestri, along with other literary works and documentary evidence, to show how the hybridized, liminal space of this city on the border with Wales was also a feminized space. In addressing both the De Laude Cestri and anchoritic life, McAvoy’s essay serves as a transition between the previous two essays and Laura Varnam’s ‘Sanctity and the City: Sacred Space in Henry Bradshaw’s Life of St Werburge,’ which forms a sequence on Bradshaw’s text (again, available on the Mapping Medieval Chester site) with Cynthia Turner Camp’s ‘Plotting Chester on the national Map: Richard Pynson’s 1521 printing of Henry Bradshaw’s Life of St Werburge.’ These two articles are perhaps less about space and mapping the way geographers might think about those terms than other articles in the volume, but they might mesh well with what Lilley identifies as geography’s ‘linguistic turn’ (p. 19). Varnam takes up the spatial imagery of Bradshaw’s text, while Camp shows the ways in which a decidedly regional text was reoriented in its London printing for a cosmopolitan, national audience. Clarke has organized an impressive multidisciplinary collection that also works well as a whole. Along with the Mapping Medieval Chester web site she has created a resource that will be of use to a range of scholars and students, and a scholarly project that serves as a model for others in its clarity of purpose and range of applications. Christina M. Fitzgerald The University of Toledo, USA http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.07.017
Steven Hoelscher (Ed), Reading Magnum: A Visual Archive of the Modern World. Austin, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas Press, 2013, 352 pages, US$50.25 hardcover. ‘In December of 2009, a collection of 200,000 photographs, known at that time as the Magnum archive, was moved from the Magnum Photos office in New York City to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin’ (p. 17). So begins Alison Nordström’s contribution to this magnificent book of essays concerned with the making and re-making of one of the most significant collections in the history of photojournalism. The move from New York to Austin completed the transition from working photo library to treasured archive that had begun some years earlier with the turn to digital. The physical form of the collection e ‘folders of dog-eared, labeled, and written upon prints’ as Nordstrom puts it e reveals much about the business model that Magnum had operated since its foundation in 1947, in which photographers joined together to create what effectively was an image lending library, whose function was to sell their work to different newspapers, magazines and book publishers
ˇ