Locating Medieval French, or Why We Collect and Visualize the Geographic Information of Texts

Abstract

This article focuses on geographic information contained in the body of medieval French texts composed over the period of the eleventh to the fifteenth century. By “geographic information” we mean textual references made to different kinds of place names at different scales within sustained prose or poetic narrative—landmarks, settlements, regions, and countries—real and imaginary. Collecting such geographic information across a large corpus of texts and analyzing it with the digital methods that have become available to scholars in recent years allow us to create new contexts in which we can reexamine a variety of questions in literary history.