International Medieval Society, Paris
Société Internationale des Médiévistes, Paris

Symposium 2009 - Space/l'Espace
Abstract

This paper explores the ways that men and women in northeastern France experienced and imagined their urban topographies as seen through the lens of descriptions crafted in charters and testaments from the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Urban spaces emerged not only in the regulations and commerce of a market place, or within the walled environs of a town, but also through the descriptions and demarcations of space drawn up in charters. In this form, monastic scribes and secular and episcopal officials employed an ever more precise and legalistic language to construct, divide, and describe the urban and suburban landscape. In this sense such officials became the arbiters of an image of urban space. This paper analyzes some of the common descriptive elements of the urban world of the fair towns of Champagne, such as the use of neighbourhoods and common boundaries, the attention to the precise measurements of plots, and the lineages of houses, fields, or rents that encoded the memories of persons to places. While charters often describe urban space, testaments offer insight into the conception, experience, and memory of these spaces and their linked disposition. Informed by the work of Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre I suggest some of the ways individuals used and produced urban space and the spaces at the margins of cities. The enumeration of bequests that became characteristic of testaments during the later thirteenth century reflect the ways individuals experienced and interacted with the urban fabric of their world and conceived of a charitable landscape that overlay the medieval urban experience. Testament bequests also suggest the way in which marginal persons and places, such as the poor men and women or leprosaria, were integrated into medieval urban life.