David Nicholas, Clemson University:
This is an important work, establishing a methodology and analytical
framework that I hope will inspire studies of these questions of language,
perception, and statecraft elsewhere, including the other towns of Provence and
cities in the north that were little affectd by the culture of the public
notaries.
John Drendel, Universite du Quebec:
This book is elegantly written, and it is a pleasure to follow its
argument through learned forays into topics ranging from cognitive psychology to
cartography.... This is an ambitious book, filled with ideas that will stimulate
researchers to look much more closely at records that they may have taken for
granted.
Josef W. Konvitz, Imago Mundi 54, 2002.:
Smail began his work on the notaries of Marseille, who played a critical
role in the late medieval period, as today, in transfers of property and in
contracts more generally. The collections of notarial records in Marseille, as
throughout Provence and Languedoc, are rich enough to support many different
thematic studes, including studies of the notaries themselves as a professional
group and of the individuals whose names appear in their records (some 14,000 in
this case). Smail's study began as such, but evolved into something else, more
imaginative, provocative and also tentative. A better first book is hard to
find.
Barbara H. Rosenwein, Loyola University Chicago:
In this original and gracefully written book, Daniel Smail transforms the
mundane name and place entries of notarial records into rich and exciting conceptual
categories that challenge our illusions about the origins of modernity. This is a
book as compelling for its methodology as for its historical
insights.
A.G. Traver:
In this interesting and thought-provoking work, Daniel Smail concludes
that the emergence of the street as the normal cartographic marker led first to the
development of urban maps, and finally to the process of attaching street addresses
to citizens.... Smail's work is scholarly and is highly
recommended.
Teofilo F. Ruiz, UCLA:
In his superb and original Imaginary Cartographies,
Daniel Smail shows how physical space and identity were constructed—through verbal
mappings of the world—in the late medieval and early-modern city. A great
achievement!
Elisabeth Hodges:
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.... 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... lays out a solid
methodological approach, navigating smoothly between the theoretical and the
archival.
Karl Appuhn, Columbia University:
This book makes a lively and original contribution to current debates on
state development.
