Expanding Horizons: Mappability, Literature, and the Making of the Medieval English World

Abstract

This dissertation set out to answer two questions: (1) how late medieval English literature represents space and (2) how mappability as both a technological and conceptual affordance acts and evolves across a variety of genres, texts, and historical moments. To answer the first question, across five chapters, I charted how spaces were conceptualized with an emanent specificity, increasingly defined by a logic in which geographic knowledge radiates outward from zones of local relevance to more distant terrains. In answer to the second question, I used the concept of mappability to demonstrate that representations of place function as ideologically shaped, reflecting changing conceptions of English identity, mobility, and epistemology (to name only a few factors at work). In this framework, mappability emerges as a synthetic experience, influenced by these factors, and generative of new literary forms, narrative strategies, and world-structuring concepts. As both a condition and consequence of literary production, mappability in late medieval and Early Modern texts offers a window into how writers understood and helped shape their audiences’ sense of where they were in the world.