Constructing and Representing Territory in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe

In recent political and legal history, scholars seldom specify how and why they use the concept of territory. In research on state-formation processes and nation building, for instance, the term mostly designates an enclosed geographical area ruled by a central government. Inspired by ideas from political geographers, this book explores the layered and constantly changing meanings of territory in late medieval and early modern Europe before cartography and state formation turned boundaries and territories into more fixed (but still changeable) geographical entities. Its central thesis is that assessing the notion of territory in a pre-modern setting involves analysing territorial practices: practices that relate people and power to space(s). The essays in this book not only examine the construction and spatial structure of pre-modern territories but also explore their perception and representation through the use of a broad range of sources: from administrative texts to maps, from stained-glass windows to chronicles.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments, List of Figures and Tables, Constructing and Representing Territory in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe: An Introduction (Mario Damen and Kim Overlaet), Part 1 The Multiplicity of Territory, Part 2 The Construction of Territory, Part 3 The Representation of Territory, Constructing and Representing Territory in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe: A Conclusion (Mario Damen and Kim Overlaet), Index

About the Author :
Mario Damen is senior lecturer at the University of Amsterdam. He has published widely on the social and political history of the late medieval Low Countries and is the PI of the research project Imagining a territory. Constructions and representations of late medieval Brabant, financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). Kim Overlaet worked from 2016 till 2019 as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam on the NWO project 'Imagining a territory'. She currently works as a research manager at the Department of History at Antwerp University.

Review :
The collection of essays is convincing due to its very high degree of coherence, which is manifested in the consistent discussion of Stuart Elden's theses despite all the breadth and diversity of topics. The authors do not make the mistake of opposing the thesis of the emergence of territory as a political concept in modern times with the assertion that it already existed in pre-modern times. Rather, all essays use the thesis as a tool to question a variety of administrative, literary, and material sources in terms of how political actors in the late Middle Ages and early modern period related people, power, and space to each other.,- Steffen Krieb, The Medieval Review, Dec. 2022, The book successfully showcases both the importance of problematizing the concept of territory within history, as well as how it can be applied and researched, especially demonstrating the complexity of the historic 'territories' and the broadness of approaches to it by looking further than the past state-centric approaches., Arnoud Jensen, The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, Dec. 2022