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This article focuses on geographic information contained in the body of medieval French texts composed over the period of the eleventh to the fifteenth century. By “geographic information” we mean textual references made to different kinds of placenames at different scaleswithin sustainedprose orpoetic narrative—landmarks, settlements, regions, and countries—real and imaginary. Collecting such geographic information across a large corpus of texts and analyzing it with the digital methods that have become available to scholars in recent years allow us to create new contexts in which we can reexamine a variety of questions in literary history. The scholarly context for the article is a digital project launched in 2014, Visualizing Medieval Places, that seeks to arrive at a “complex understanding of cultural space-time” for the large corpus of literature written in medieval French. The methodological approach adopted here diverges from classic studies of medieval cartography inasmuch as it is not concerned primarily with analyzing medieval notions of space or their conceptual, visual, and cartographic expression in historical maps. The article looks at where, when, and how often locations are mentioned in a literary-historical corpus. We proceed from the basic idea that an evocation of a geographical location within a text is not gratuitous, and is worthy of critical exploration like any other subject. Place is, after all, asmuch a topical consideration as it is a geographical one. Textual geographies, as they have been called by some, visually collate spatial references found in a work, but they are not simply the depiction of a text’s realism. Instead, they are indicative of a more layered set of relationships related to geographic space: provenance, patronage, setting, even the overlap between spaces of textual production and more symbolic or imaginary realms. This article does not deal explicitly with the concept of mapping fictional narrative, that is, the spatializing of text from a theoretical, narratological perspec-

Locating Medieval French, or Why We Collect and Visualize the Geographic Information of Texts