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Christian D. Liddy. Contesting the City: The Politics of Citizenship in English Towns, 1250–1530. Oxford Studies in Medieval European History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xxii, 254. $97.50 (cloth).

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merated manors of the region not only supported the idea that the region could now be known by consumers, but also that it enjoyed English possession. Koot writes “as a… Click to show full abstract

merated manors of the region not only supported the idea that the region could now be known by consumers, but also that it enjoyed English possession. Koot writes “as a tool for navigation, claiming territory, resolving border disputes, and imagining strange lands, it [the map] had become a thoroughly imperial artifact” (214). And Herrman, too, appears on the map in a “cultivated” portrait that erased the colonial reality and replaced it with a more fitting image (for the imperial narrative) of a metropolitan conventional scholar. Koot ends his last chapter with an interesting story of how this “imperial artifact” might have “played” on a colonial stage. An anonymous Maryland petitioner complained of the “Maryland Papists” and Lord Baltimore whose absolutist intentions were on full display in the map as Calvert’s coat of arms were presented equally with the royal arms. Putting aside the reality that Calvert’s arms were smaller and presented in a lower position to the royal arms on the map, Koot reminds the reader that “a colonial way of seeing lurks in many metropolitan maps” (216). Into the eighteenth century, Herrman’s map of the Chesapeake influenced other works even as the navigational information became obsolete and now stripped of its local meaning it was fully absorbed into the imperial narrative (220). Herrman’s story, too, lost its intercolonial foundation in favor of a nineteenth-century son of Bohemia or more ironic for Herrman, “a true American” (228). No matter one’s interest or discipline with or without an area of research, Koot presents an exceptional story to be savored while read.

Keywords: contesting city; oxford; politics citizenship; christian liddy; city politics; liddy contesting

Journal Title: Journal of British Studies
Year Published: 2019

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