Epistemic Topographies: Quotidian Relationships between Landscapes and Knowledge in Fifteenth Century Italy

The landscapes of fifteenth century Italy are a rich archive of cultural and social life. Examining the way space impinged on, and was produced in, a wide range of fifteenth century texts, this thesis demonstrates how cultural meaning, social reality and various forms of knowledge manifested themselves in the premodern landscape. I characterise the capacity for landscapes to store, process and communicate knowledge about neighbours, antiquity, politics, property ownership and personal identity as ‘epistemic topography’. By treating all sources, including works of humanist erudition, family management and epistolary collections, as joint participants in a cultural moment, this thesis reconstructs a view of the practice of life in the fifteenth century. This capacity of space to store knowledge meant that it could also serve as a gestural, rhetorical medium of communication. These intellectual operations drew on the everyday forms and patterns of experience in the fifteenth century and so preserve an impression of social reality. Aspects of gendered experience contained in the epistemic topographies of fifteenth century texts show how classes of people could manipulate space and so exercise their agency. By recovering processes by which people invested their landscape with meaning, this thesis reveals the cognate relationships and dialectical interconnections between several elements of premodern Italian culture