Visualizing a Post Medieval Landscapes Through Tax Documents
Paula Kay Lazrus, St. John’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Institute of Core Studies
Abstract: In the early 1800s Southern Calabria passed back and forth between imperial powers, moving from Bourbon Rule, to Napoleonic control and back again. Each new government attempted to assess their possessions by demanding forms to be filled out by citizens in the various communities under their control. These tax forms list the owners, their possessions (crops or buildings), the localities of their possessions and money owed. Numbers and charts are quite useful, but spatial distributions of crops and plants are more easily understood in a visual format that also allows us to ask questions about social as well as economic relations. The images presented here are a first step in that process.