Mapping the Medieval Bishop: Sacral Landscape and Episcopal Activity in Thirteenth-Century Avignon

At the nexus of episcopal studies, topography, and urban Mediterranean history, this project employs digital mapping to examine the expression of the bishop’s power in and around the city of Avignon in the thirteenth century.  Despite their focus on the hereafter, medieval bishops were inevitably entrenched in the here-and-now.  Identifying and recreating a religious landscape—a veneer of spiritually inflected spaces grafted upon a topography already invested with cultural significance—enables historians to better understand how a bishop’s spiritual, consecrated status was inextricably intertwined with the economic, the political, and the mundane.  Though better known for hosting the papal curia from 1309-1378, Avignon in the thirteenth century boasted a unique set of competing political and religious powers that make it an ideal setting for a close study of the bishops who managed these conflicting imperial, papal, and civic agendas.

Digital mapping with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology permits scholars to explore how ideas about episcopal authority, tradition, and the generative role of religion in a medieval city could become manifest through the bishop’s ideological, spiritual, and practical reshaping of the urban landscape.  Maps built upon manuscript evidence reveal how bishops claimed space, redefined natural and built sites, and controlled the interactions among urban communities that occupied a finite, shared space.  This project maps the activity of the city’s first Italian bishop, Zoen Tencarari (r.1241-1260), who came to office in a period of civic upheaval and played an important role in realigning Avignon’s allegiances from the Holy Roman Empire back to the pope.   This poster will display GIS-generated images that illustrate changes in Avignon’s religious landscape during the course of Bishop Zoen’s tenure, suggesting an alternative spiritual analysis of events and transactions that historians have written off as merely feudal in nature.  This study thus builds upon recent works that look at how bishops shaped, and were shaped by, their particular historical circumstances in order to understand how they inscribed physical space with sacral meaning and made their authority explicit to their urban communities.