What does it mean to be somewhere? To what extent, and in which specific ways, is the way we experience the land historically and therefore culturally specific?
In Landscape and Experience in Medieval Anatolia, Nicolas Trepanier explores how travellers, urban elites and peasants related to the rural territory of medieval Anatolia, revealing how the same land could generate profoundly different experiences in a time of transition from Byzantine to Muslim rule. Through its use of landscape phenomenology, the book offers historians not only an alternative to the 'Spatial Turn' that concentrates on historical subjectivities, but also an epistemologically-grounded way to integrate fieldwork into their research. It also proposes a new perspective on the phenomenological approaches that have polarized landscape archaeology over the recent decades. More than anything else, however, this book shows readers of any background how history can provide fresh perspectives on our own modern experiences of the land.
