The Map Precedes the Territory: Essays of Place

The parchment pages of Matthew Parris's 13th century maps are rudimentary -- 'crooked line drawings and imprecisely inked passageways.' 'Such maps require us to distance ourselves,' writes the cartography scholar Michael Gaudio, 'from modern mapping practices with their 'transparent' schematizations of objective space, so that we can recognize this cartography for what it is -- 'not a primitive version of our own but a positive form of organizing space in a world in which signs are not tied to their referents and meanings are never final.' Pointing to these places of fluidity, the sites of permeable meaning making, is the function of this collection of essays. Weaving personal memory, travel writing and mesmeric histories, these cartographically-themed braided narratives point to the transections between public and private, past and present, personal and global. In short, these essays, I think, encapsulate revelatory moments enjambed in everyday life, singular experiences that imbue all else.