I am Professor of Historical Geography, based in the UK, with particular interests in the history of cartography, urban morphology, and landscape history. I use maps and mappings to explore past landscapes and geographies as well as how the past connects with the present.
For more than 15 years I have directed funded spatial humanities research projects, all using digital 'geospatial technologies' (eg GIS). I currently have 4 funded research projects further developing this work:
1. An AHRC-funded public engagement centre, "Living Legacies 1914-18: From Past Conflict to Shared Future", which connects academic and community researchers through WW1 heritage projects - including 'citizen history' and community mapping projects - for more information see: http://www.livinglegacies1914-18.ac.uk/
2. A British Academy funded project called "Surveying Empires: Archaeologies of Colonial Cartography in West Bengal, India", in collaboration with colleagues in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Calcutta (India), a project which is following in the footsteps of George Everest and the surveyors of the Great Trigonometrical Survey (GTS) of India by digitally recording the surviving remains of the trigonometrical towers constructed for survey work in West Bengal in the 1820s-1860s. See http://surveyingempires.org/ for information on the project.
3. A Leverhulme Trust funded project called "Mapping Lineages: Quantifying the Evolution of Maps of the British Isles", in collaboration with The British Library, and using GIS and spatial analysis techniques to trace the 'genealogy' of national mapping of Great Britain from the 14th to 17th centuries.
4. An AHRC funded project with the University of Exeter and National Library of Wales to digitise and analyse the maps of Humphrey Llwyd, a 16th century polymath--dubbed "inventor of Britain"--who created the first detailed map of Wales which appeared in 1573 in the 'Additamentum' to the 1570 publication of 'Theatrum Orbis Terrarum' by Abraham Ortelius.
Together, these funded research projects seek to advance our knowledge and understanding of the 'spatial practices' of past cartographers and surveyors, as well as explore the potential modern-day spatial technologies have for connecting mapping past, present and future.
For more information about these projects and my work, please contact me.
Phone: +44 (0)2890 973363
Address: Elmwood (Geography) Building
Elmwood Avenue
School of Natural and Built Environment
Queen's University Belfast
Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK. BT7 1NN.
For more than 15 years I have directed funded spatial humanities research projects, all using digital 'geospatial technologies' (eg GIS). I currently have 4 funded research projects further developing this work:
1. An AHRC-funded public engagement centre, "Living Legacies 1914-18: From Past Conflict to Shared Future", which connects academic and community researchers through WW1 heritage projects - including 'citizen history' and community mapping projects - for more information see: http://www.livinglegacies1914-18.ac.uk/
2. A British Academy funded project called "Surveying Empires: Archaeologies of Colonial Cartography in West Bengal, India", in collaboration with colleagues in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Calcutta (India), a project which is following in the footsteps of George Everest and the surveyors of the Great Trigonometrical Survey (GTS) of India by digitally recording the surviving remains of the trigonometrical towers constructed for survey work in West Bengal in the 1820s-1860s. See http://surveyingempires.org/ for information on the project.
3. A Leverhulme Trust funded project called "Mapping Lineages: Quantifying the Evolution of Maps of the British Isles", in collaboration with The British Library, and using GIS and spatial analysis techniques to trace the 'genealogy' of national mapping of Great Britain from the 14th to 17th centuries.
4. An AHRC funded project with the University of Exeter and National Library of Wales to digitise and analyse the maps of Humphrey Llwyd, a 16th century polymath--dubbed "inventor of Britain"--who created the first detailed map of Wales which appeared in 1573 in the 'Additamentum' to the 1570 publication of 'Theatrum Orbis Terrarum' by Abraham Ortelius.
Together, these funded research projects seek to advance our knowledge and understanding of the 'spatial practices' of past cartographers and surveyors, as well as explore the potential modern-day spatial technologies have for connecting mapping past, present and future.
For more information about these projects and my work, please contact me.
Phone: +44 (0)2890 973363
Address: Elmwood (Geography) Building
Elmwood Avenue
School of Natural and Built Environment
Queen's University Belfast
Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK. BT7 1NN.
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Drawing upon original accounts, illustrations and maps from across medieval Europe, and on science, religion, art, literature, drama and architecture of the Latin West, 'City and Cosmos' offers an innovative interpretation of how medieval Christians saw their urban worlds. Linking together textual and visual evidence, it examines how the city was understood simultaneously as a ‘body’ writ large and as a scaled-down version of the cosmos, each sharing common spatial forms and functional ordering.
Crossing traditional subject boundaries, 'City and Cosmos' will appeal to a wide range of medievalists working in history, archaeology, philology, philosophy and theology. It will also help students of architecture, urban planning, art history and human geography to re-evaluate the material and imagined forms of European towns and cities. The idea it propounds – that cities have deep meaning in the human imagination – will also give the book wide appeal to those interested in urbanism and urban life.
Reviewer comments:
'Keith Lilley's excellent new book takes as its theme the idea of the city as it was played out, performed and remediated in medieval culture . . . The book, like the urban forms it describes, is impressively far-reaching, beautifully designed and richly illustrated.'
– Urban History
'The virtue of Lilley’s book is that it makes us seriously consider the relationship between the city where medieval people lived and the city of God that they imagined . . . this book would make an excellent reference textbook for graduate students as well as scholars unfamiliar with the field.' – Imago Mundi
'an important look at how the "urban city" of the Middle Ages is connected to God's hierarchical arrangement of the universe and the city's place within this ordering . . . Lilley has achieved his goal of providing a new perspective on understanding the city's cultural and material construct . . . This book would make an excellent foundation on which to form a course on the cities of the Middle Ages, due to the fact that it contains so many diverse aspects that can be studied in an interdisciplinary fashion and its relatively inexpensive price. The book is well illustrated throughout, giving Lilley the ability to enhance his readers' understanding by providing visual references and he does a good job of using illustrations as evidence for his points.' – The Medieval Review
'Reference to detailed mapping of a number of medieval cities has enabled Keith Lilley to challenge traditional functional views of the city and to suggest that equally important to its inhabitants was its cosmological symbolism . . . Due to the interdisciplinary nature of this book, its arguments making use of scientific, artistic, religious and dramatic material, it is likely to be of use to students of all these areas, as well as to historians and cartographers, offering as it does a new perspective on medieval urbanism.' – Society of Cartographers Bulletin
'How far was the form of medieval towns conditioned by practical functions, whether economic, military, or political, and how far by religious and symbolic considerations? Strong claims for the latter interpretation are made by Lilley in this clearly written and handsomely illustrated book. The argument is wide ranging, drawing material from the Bible, cosmology, political philosophy, learned and practical geometry, depictions, maps and reconstructions of street layouts, and Corpus Christi processions and performances.'
– Economic History Review
'a stunning new volume that explores the idea of the city in the medieval imagination. In a finely-detailed yet compelling account, Lilley considers the powerful and enduring link between medieval conceptions of the city and geometrical forms that expressed the work of God, highlighting the place of urbanism within a divinely ordered hierarchy . . . handsomely produced and richly illustrated . . . contains some marvellously vivid medieval maps, and the book is full of instantly intelligible plans of selected towns and cities . . . intensely thought-provoking and opens up radically different avenues for medieval urban research and for understanding the depth and complexity of Christian and other symbolism in the urban world . . . of huge interest to historical and cultural geographers, but medievalists in general, and archaeologists in particular, need to read it.' – Urban Morphology
'City and Cosmos provides an exciting bird’s-eye view of urban life in the Middle Ages, when the urban body was connected with the body of Christ, and city, cosmos and man were seen to be linked through sacred geometry and harmonic proportion. Keith Lilley’s compelling account is a reminder that for many medieval Christians, the city was a reflection of God’s beauty and presence in the world, a physical manifestation of the beauty of the body of the universe created by God, and a model of the world to come.'
– Alessandro Scafi, The Warburg Institute, University of London
'It is a pleasure, as a literary scholar, to follow Lilley’s assertion of the influence of medieval root-two geometric principles and their intersection with Classical cosmological thought, Christian scriptures, and the social practices of exclusion and pageantry on the formation of medieval urban spaces. Richly illustrative and drawing on an impressive array of textual, cartographic, and material evidence, Lilley’s City and Cosmos is a significant contribution to the emerging interdisciplinary field of social geography, critical theory, and textual study. Lilley’s expansive scholarship establishes the deeply symbolic connection between medieval conceptions of body, city, and cosmos and the way in which the very streets mark this habitus of thought.'
– Meg Roland, Associate Professor of English, Marylhurst University
After the year 1000, all across Europe urban life prospered as it had never done before. New towns emerged, and established towns and cities grew larger and became more powerful and dominant. During the later Middle Ages these towns and cities were the focus of religious, political, commercial and social activity; the places where power, profit, piety and people all came together. Urban life was indeed the making of medieval Europe.
Drawing upon original research, as well as the work of medieval historians, urban archaeologists and historical geographers, Keith Lilley explores the close relationship that existed between the life of towns in the Middle Ages and the life within towns. Taking a fresh and challenging approach, this richly-illustrated book will be invaluable to anyone interested in medieval Europe. It focuses on important themes, including lordship, property, and townscape, and explores the processes which not only shaped the towns and cities of medieval Europe, but also the people who lived in them.
Reviewer comments:
'This is an excellent introduction to urban studies, from a novel perspective - it is the first book on medieval towns to give the urban space proper attention, and the only one I know to take a cultural history perspective.' - Professor Christopher Dyer, University of Leicester
'An original approach to urban history - especially at undergraduate level. Refreshing, clear and well explained - with a good selection of comparative examples.' - S. Rees Jones, University of York
'...an excellent introductory survey which would be ideal for students.' - Elizabeth Freeman, University of Tasmania, Paregon 20.1
'Urban Life proves to be a pleasant introduction to medieval history, as the author successfully synthesizes older and modern reaserch.' - Prof. Dr. Albrecht Classen, University of Arizona, USA
fifteenth centuries. Here, instead, a case is made that after 1350 urban planning continued to influence towns and cities in England through the transformation of their townscapes. Using the conceptual approaches of urban morphologists in particular, the article demonstrates that not only did the foundation of new towns and creation of new suburbs characterize the period 1350–1530, but so too did the redevelopment of existing urban landscapes through civic improvements and public works. These reveal evidence for the particular ‘agents of change’ involved in the planning and development process, such as surveyors, officials, patrons and
architects, and also the role played by maps and drawn surveys. In this reappraisal, England’s urban experiences can be seen to have been closely connected with those instances of urban planning after the Black Death occurring elsewhere in contemporary continental Europe.
include (1) records that can be linked to spatial locations and (2) historic maps that have been scanned and converted to digital images. Data sources that fall into the first category may refer to point locations (e.g. a town on a large-scale map) or zones (often administrative regions) for areas at a variety of spatial scales. In terms of (2), maps may be enhanced through digitisation of the objects that the maps contain, creating separate digital layers representing features such as coastlines, streets and locations of specific places. Historic spatial data are subject to a number of particular issues that may affect how they can be used. Accuracy of the information contained in the data, in terms of both spatial (e.g. precision of survey) and non-spatial attributes (e.g. counts of people in a given category in a particular area), must be considered as must the mode of representation of the data (points, areas, etc.). Comparison of data derived from different sources that may be separated by large time periods, and that may have been generated with very different purposes in mind, is potentially highly problematic. This article reviews the key categories of geographical historical data available as well as the kinds of data-related problems faced by those who wish to explore historic environments using GIS.
Keywords: historical GIS; urban change; medieval towns; Belfast
Keywords: Medieval maps; settlement geography; Plantagenet Britain; Gough map; Geographical Information System (GIS); cartographic distortion; regression analyses; geographical knowledge
Drawing upon original accounts, illustrations and maps from across medieval Europe, and on science, religion, art, literature, drama and architecture of the Latin West, 'City and Cosmos' offers an innovative interpretation of how medieval Christians saw their urban worlds. Linking together textual and visual evidence, it examines how the city was understood simultaneously as a ‘body’ writ large and as a scaled-down version of the cosmos, each sharing common spatial forms and functional ordering.
Crossing traditional subject boundaries, 'City and Cosmos' will appeal to a wide range of medievalists working in history, archaeology, philology, philosophy and theology. It will also help students of architecture, urban planning, art history and human geography to re-evaluate the material and imagined forms of European towns and cities. The idea it propounds – that cities have deep meaning in the human imagination – will also give the book wide appeal to those interested in urbanism and urban life.
Reviewer comments:
'Keith Lilley's excellent new book takes as its theme the idea of the city as it was played out, performed and remediated in medieval culture . . . The book, like the urban forms it describes, is impressively far-reaching, beautifully designed and richly illustrated.'
– Urban History
'The virtue of Lilley’s book is that it makes us seriously consider the relationship between the city where medieval people lived and the city of God that they imagined . . . this book would make an excellent reference textbook for graduate students as well as scholars unfamiliar with the field.' – Imago Mundi
'an important look at how the "urban city" of the Middle Ages is connected to God's hierarchical arrangement of the universe and the city's place within this ordering . . . Lilley has achieved his goal of providing a new perspective on understanding the city's cultural and material construct . . . This book would make an excellent foundation on which to form a course on the cities of the Middle Ages, due to the fact that it contains so many diverse aspects that can be studied in an interdisciplinary fashion and its relatively inexpensive price. The book is well illustrated throughout, giving Lilley the ability to enhance his readers' understanding by providing visual references and he does a good job of using illustrations as evidence for his points.' – The Medieval Review
'Reference to detailed mapping of a number of medieval cities has enabled Keith Lilley to challenge traditional functional views of the city and to suggest that equally important to its inhabitants was its cosmological symbolism . . . Due to the interdisciplinary nature of this book, its arguments making use of scientific, artistic, religious and dramatic material, it is likely to be of use to students of all these areas, as well as to historians and cartographers, offering as it does a new perspective on medieval urbanism.' – Society of Cartographers Bulletin
'How far was the form of medieval towns conditioned by practical functions, whether economic, military, or political, and how far by religious and symbolic considerations? Strong claims for the latter interpretation are made by Lilley in this clearly written and handsomely illustrated book. The argument is wide ranging, drawing material from the Bible, cosmology, political philosophy, learned and practical geometry, depictions, maps and reconstructions of street layouts, and Corpus Christi processions and performances.'
– Economic History Review
'a stunning new volume that explores the idea of the city in the medieval imagination. In a finely-detailed yet compelling account, Lilley considers the powerful and enduring link between medieval conceptions of the city and geometrical forms that expressed the work of God, highlighting the place of urbanism within a divinely ordered hierarchy . . . handsomely produced and richly illustrated . . . contains some marvellously vivid medieval maps, and the book is full of instantly intelligible plans of selected towns and cities . . . intensely thought-provoking and opens up radically different avenues for medieval urban research and for understanding the depth and complexity of Christian and other symbolism in the urban world . . . of huge interest to historical and cultural geographers, but medievalists in general, and archaeologists in particular, need to read it.' – Urban Morphology
'City and Cosmos provides an exciting bird’s-eye view of urban life in the Middle Ages, when the urban body was connected with the body of Christ, and city, cosmos and man were seen to be linked through sacred geometry and harmonic proportion. Keith Lilley’s compelling account is a reminder that for many medieval Christians, the city was a reflection of God’s beauty and presence in the world, a physical manifestation of the beauty of the body of the universe created by God, and a model of the world to come.'
– Alessandro Scafi, The Warburg Institute, University of London
'It is a pleasure, as a literary scholar, to follow Lilley’s assertion of the influence of medieval root-two geometric principles and their intersection with Classical cosmological thought, Christian scriptures, and the social practices of exclusion and pageantry on the formation of medieval urban spaces. Richly illustrative and drawing on an impressive array of textual, cartographic, and material evidence, Lilley’s City and Cosmos is a significant contribution to the emerging interdisciplinary field of social geography, critical theory, and textual study. Lilley’s expansive scholarship establishes the deeply symbolic connection between medieval conceptions of body, city, and cosmos and the way in which the very streets mark this habitus of thought.'
– Meg Roland, Associate Professor of English, Marylhurst University
After the year 1000, all across Europe urban life prospered as it had never done before. New towns emerged, and established towns and cities grew larger and became more powerful and dominant. During the later Middle Ages these towns and cities were the focus of religious, political, commercial and social activity; the places where power, profit, piety and people all came together. Urban life was indeed the making of medieval Europe.
Drawing upon original research, as well as the work of medieval historians, urban archaeologists and historical geographers, Keith Lilley explores the close relationship that existed between the life of towns in the Middle Ages and the life within towns. Taking a fresh and challenging approach, this richly-illustrated book will be invaluable to anyone interested in medieval Europe. It focuses on important themes, including lordship, property, and townscape, and explores the processes which not only shaped the towns and cities of medieval Europe, but also the people who lived in them.
Reviewer comments:
'This is an excellent introduction to urban studies, from a novel perspective - it is the first book on medieval towns to give the urban space proper attention, and the only one I know to take a cultural history perspective.' - Professor Christopher Dyer, University of Leicester
'An original approach to urban history - especially at undergraduate level. Refreshing, clear and well explained - with a good selection of comparative examples.' - S. Rees Jones, University of York
'...an excellent introductory survey which would be ideal for students.' - Elizabeth Freeman, University of Tasmania, Paregon 20.1
'Urban Life proves to be a pleasant introduction to medieval history, as the author successfully synthesizes older and modern reaserch.' - Prof. Dr. Albrecht Classen, University of Arizona, USA
fifteenth centuries. Here, instead, a case is made that after 1350 urban planning continued to influence towns and cities in England through the transformation of their townscapes. Using the conceptual approaches of urban morphologists in particular, the article demonstrates that not only did the foundation of new towns and creation of new suburbs characterize the period 1350–1530, but so too did the redevelopment of existing urban landscapes through civic improvements and public works. These reveal evidence for the particular ‘agents of change’ involved in the planning and development process, such as surveyors, officials, patrons and
architects, and also the role played by maps and drawn surveys. In this reappraisal, England’s urban experiences can be seen to have been closely connected with those instances of urban planning after the Black Death occurring elsewhere in contemporary continental Europe.
include (1) records that can be linked to spatial locations and (2) historic maps that have been scanned and converted to digital images. Data sources that fall into the first category may refer to point locations (e.g. a town on a large-scale map) or zones (often administrative regions) for areas at a variety of spatial scales. In terms of (2), maps may be enhanced through digitisation of the objects that the maps contain, creating separate digital layers representing features such as coastlines, streets and locations of specific places. Historic spatial data are subject to a number of particular issues that may affect how they can be used. Accuracy of the information contained in the data, in terms of both spatial (e.g. precision of survey) and non-spatial attributes (e.g. counts of people in a given category in a particular area), must be considered as must the mode of representation of the data (points, areas, etc.). Comparison of data derived from different sources that may be separated by large time periods, and that may have been generated with very different purposes in mind, is potentially highly problematic. This article reviews the key categories of geographical historical data available as well as the kinds of data-related problems faced by those who wish to explore historic environments using GIS.
Keywords: historical GIS; urban change; medieval towns; Belfast
Keywords: Medieval maps; settlement geography; Plantagenet Britain; Gough map; Geographical Information System (GIS); cartographic distortion; regression analyses; geographical knowledge
Keywords: bidimensional regression; Gough Map; historical cartography; local regression; medieval maps
aristocracy, who established and developed these blueprints of urban life.
* For a facsimile of the 'map' see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Robert_Ricart's_map_of_Bristol.png
"
Keith Lilley (Queen’s University Belfast)
Urban morphology is the ‘study of urban form’ and is an approach that has particular value in analysing medieval urban landscapes and mapping their formation and transformation. In the UK and Ireland, urban morphologists have been largely influenced by the work of M R G Conzen, whose emphasis was on recognising town plans as historical records of urban evolution. He used examples of small medieval towns, such as Conwy, Alnwick and Ludlow, to demonstrate his ‘town plan analysis’ method which he developed during the 1960s. Since then, his work has coalesced into a distinctive ‘school’ or tradition of urban morphology (see Whitehand and Larkham 1992). Conzen’s principles have since been widely applied to medieval towns and cities, particularly by geographers and archaeologists, and the merits of the plan analysis method demonstrated (see Lilley 2000). Over the last decade, I have adapted and developed the map-based morphogenetic approaches of the Conzenian tradition through using spatial technologies, especially Geographical Information Systems (GIS) (see Lilley et al 2005a). This paper reports on one of these projects which used GIS and other spatial technologies to map and analyse a group of medieval ‘new towns’ founded in a 30-year period (between 1277-1307) under the authority of King Edward I (Lilley et al 2007).
Using urban morphology as a basis, the Mapping the Medieval Urban Landscape project sought to map and analyse the plans of Edward I’s ‘new towns’, to see what this might reveal of their design and planning, a process about which little is known from conventional documentary sources (see Lilley et al 2005b). The paper will outline the digital methods employed by the project, particularly how scanned historic maps and plans were used for selectively digitizing medieval urban features, and using these to create new detailed plans of each of Edward’s new towns. This work involved digitizing archaeological plans, as well as field survey. The latter was undertaken by the project team using Leica GPS and Total Stations, providing a rich source of spatial data not only for georectifying the map layers in the GIS but also for helping us to analyse the morphologies of the towns further by exploring their metrology. Such metrological analysis also builds upon analogue methods previously used by urban morphologists, and allowed us to quantify the forms of new towns to look for recurring patterns of measurement used by their surveyors.
The methods used in processing spatial data are discussed in the first half of the paper while the second part turns to look at what results these yield on questions of who created Edward’s new towns and how they were designed and planned. One of the advantages of a digitized plan-analysis is that is provides a means of creating a series of scaled detailed morphological plans of Edward’s new towns that can then be subjected to further comparative study to look for common elements of design and planning, for example. This is easily done within a GIS, particularly in producing comparisons of medieval urban forms. The extraction of certain urban features allows them to be directly compared, which usefully shows how certain urban designs were copied from town to town. However, the process is not always that straightforward for other examples show how even adjacent towns founded at the same time had different forms chosen for their layouts. All this helps us to understand much more the agents involved in aspects of medieval urban design and planning at the end of the thirteenth century in England and Wales, as well as demonstrating how spatial technologies can assist the work of urban morphologists and enhance the methods used by those following in the Conzenian tradition.
References:
Lilley K D (2000), ‘Mapping the medieval city: plan analysis and urban history’, Urban History 27(1), 5-30.
Lilley K D , Lloyd C, Trick S and Graham, C (2005a), ‘Analysing and mapping medieval urban forms using GPS and GIS’, Urban Morphology 9, 1-9.
Lilley K D, Lloyd C D and Trick S (2005b), Mapping Medieval Townscapes: a digital atlas of the new towns of Edward I (University of York), published online by AHDS http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/specColl/atlas_ahrb_2005
Lilley K D, Lloyd C, and Trick S (2007) ‘Designs and designers of medieval ‘new towns’ in Wales’, Antiquity 81, 279-93
Whitehand J W R and Larkham P J (eds.) (1992), Urban Landscapes: international perspectives (London, 1992)