{"word_count": 449, "character_count": 3072}
This year two members of "Cities of Readers" presented papers at the International Medieval Congress 2017 in Leeds:Sabrina Corbellini presented a paper entitled Spiritual Landscapes in Late Medieval Florence: Letters and Networksin the session: "Spiritual Landscapes: Mapping Female Spirituality in the Middle Ages II", organised by the "Spiritual landscapes" project (University of Barcelona).Sabrina was also a referent in the Round Table discussion "New Religious Histories: Rethinking the Study of Medieval Religion".Margriet Hoogvliet organised the session:Mappings, II: Producing and Reproducing Local MapsMedieval mapmaking is often thought to have been above all 'unscientific' and 'symbolic'. Recent publications have, however, revived the interest in local maps and plans from the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period by unearthing forgotten documents from the archives that are sometimes the result of advanced land-measuring techniques. Local maps are also important records of the representation of identities, or of changing spatial conceptualizations. Finally, digital techniques such as GIS and His-GIS offer exciting new possibilities for reproducing and re-using these historical documents for spatial analyses.with contributions by:Paul Fermon (EPHE, Paris): "The Traditions of Geometrical Representation and the Rise of Local Mapmaking during the 14th Century and the 15th Century: Italy and South of France"Désiré Krikken (University of Groningen): "My Plot, Your Plat, Our Inhabited Landscape: Early Modern Land Surveyors and the Record of European Physical and Social Space"Margriet's paper was entitled: Using Historical Maps for GIS-Based Analysis: Religious Books in AmiensThe post-mortem inventories in the série FF of the Archives communales in Amiens generally contain quite detailed information about the religious books owned by lay people, as well as about the location of their houses in early sixteenth century Amiens (here 1503-c. 1530), thus allowing for a quite precise localisation of "lieux de savoir" in lay people's homes and a GIS-based analysis of the spatial dynamics of religious knowledge in urban social networks. Because of the damages of two World Wars, much of medieval Amiens is now lost. Consequently, early modern maps and plans are important sources in order to reconstruct the street plan of late medieval Amiens and to reproduce a map of the town as it was approximately in the period 1450-1520. Sixteenth-century maps and town views of Amiens and its fertile "hortillonages"  (the oldest map dates from 1542, now in the Archives départementales de la Somme) are also instrumental in our modern understanding of historical urban identities and perceptions of Amiens as a prosperous, religious, and fiercely defended town on the border of France and the Low Countries.Please note: Next year, at the IMC 2018 the "Cities of Readers" project hopes to present a series of four sessions on the theme "Performances"(Performances of writing, Performances of collecting, Performances of reading, Performances of theatre).