Representing Place in Corrozet's Antiquitez de Paris

Abstract

Abstract This article investigates how the French Renaissance guidebook creates a legible sense of place. In part a response to the developing marketplace for printed texts in the capital, the genre was developed by Gilles Corrozet between 1530 and 1550. A hybrid text, part urban history, part folkloric national memoir, the guidebook narrates the history of the city through an examination of its antiquities and origin stories. For Corrozet, place was a means to understand and negotiate relations between history, the self and space at an historical moment when the book, like the map, functioned as a material signifier for the exploration and the representation of the self and the world. While Corrozet's guidebooks locate the experience of given places within an historical trajectory, the portability of these books, produced mostly in handheld format, reveals another of the guidebook's functions as it traces a traveller's itinerary, a journey that provides the book's spatial plan. As a portable ‘lieu de mémoire’, it guides the reader to experience place and landscape as a continuum between the book and its object, and also participates in a larger historical and political demography by aligning writings on cities with an emerging politics of centralization.

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