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3 results

  • Chapter 3 - Across the Sea

  • Andrew M. Richmond, Southern Connecticut State University
  • Book:
    Landscape in Middle English Romance
    Published online:
    06 August 2021
    Print publication:
    05 August 2021, pp 99-132

  • Summary

    Chapter 3 moves beyond the boundary space of the sea to consider the landscape descriptions of “foreign” lands in medieval English romance. Despite the allure of fantasy and exotic settings endemic to the genre of romance, many Middle English texts create imaginative landscapes that delineate recognizably English topography. Intriguingly, such passages of landscape description also focus primarily on urban landscapes, emphasizing the economic and political interconnectedness of town and countryside. I look at similarities between these scenes, and consider why certain details come to be associated with these imaginative landscape settings in the texts of Titus and Vespasian and Kyng Alisaunder surviving in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 622, a manuscript saturated with tales of the Holy Land and the Far East. These texts may champion the ability of landscape engineers to reshape the base clay of Creation, but they also use the distant lands of the Middle and Far East as spaces to contemplate the hubris of such actions in a Christian universe – especially in the increasingly hazardous ecological events English readers experienced at the close of the Middle Ages.

  • 10 - Writing and record-keeping in early cities

  • from Part II - Early cities and information technologies
  • Edited by Norman Yoffee, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
  • Book:
    The Cambridge World History
    Published online:
    05 March 2015
    Print publication:
    12 March 2015, pp 207-226

  • Summary

    Classic Maya cities were dynamic places constructed throughout the Yucatan Peninsula and adjacent zones during much of the first millennium CE. This chapter examines how Maya cities were understood, used, and altered. Other named features of urban landscapes include pyramids and altars, neither, unfortunately, with fully accepted readings of their glyphic references. Other buildings in the Maya texts correspond to stairways, known as ehb, and ballcourts recorded by glyphs that are not yet deciphered. A notable attribute of later Maya ideas about appropriate or correct behavior is that it conforms to movement and handed-ness. Right and straight correspond closely to concepts of truth, virtue, cleansing, even prophecy. A final, remaining theme is that Maya cities accord with general concepts of landscape features yet also remain a malleable work-in-progress. The view of any such city today would contain a certain arrangement of buildings and spaces in urban armatures.

  • 22 - Imagined cities

  • from Part V - Early cities as creations
  • Edited by Norman Yoffee, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
  • Book:
    The Cambridge World History
    Published online:
    05 March 2015
    Print publication:
    12 March 2015, pp 455-466

  • Summary

    This chapter reviews current knowledge of the first period of South Asian urbanism, situating the Indus cities in their larger regional landscapes. It addressees the end of the Indus tradition and the cities that followed more than a millennium later. In conceptualizing the larger Indus phenomenon, questions of scale rise to the fore. The geographic extent of sites containing Indus material culture assemblages is enormous. The chapter explores two very different urban trajectories and urban landscapes of ancient South Asia. The first one is characterized by a small number of massive widely spaced cities that existed as islands of urbanism in a vast sea of villages. The other one is characterized by closely packed urban places in a landscape of cities. The duration of many Early Historic Indian cities continued much longer, many remaining vibrant centers of population long after the Mauryan Empire's fall and through numerous successive states and empires, and leaving a legacy that endures to the present.