Seminar: “‘Won’t You Be My Neighbor?’: Property Mapping as Social History”
Katherine Pierpont (Mellon Fellow, PIMS)
Neighborhoods are exercises in place-making; people come together to create meaning through their interactions with one another and their surrounding environment. This seminar explores how mapping fiefs held by lower-class artisans in twelfth century Toulouse, shows where individuals lived and worked, what their occupations were, who surrounded them, and, in short, the makeup of their neighborhood. Records in the John Mundy Collection reveal the stories of a widow’s remarriage to her deceased husband’s friend, of an unsuccessful rent strike against a usurer, and the story of a man renowned enough to have a street named after him but whose first name remained unknown for centuries. What we uncover may not be the neighborhood of Fred Rogers imagination, but within dense webs of medieval legalese, we can reconstruct an environmental ecosystem of interrelations that shed light on the humanity of the medieval era.
Image: Map of 12th century Toulouse by John H. Mundy