Imaginary Worlds,Real Stories

St Edmund, King and Martyr survived the Reformation as a hero and emblem of East Anglian regional identity. This article traces the development of the post-Reformation Edmund in ‘popular’ sources, including his continuing presence in the landscape and the influence of the nineteenth-century ‘cult of commemoration’ on perceptions of the saint.     

Constructing Abstract Worlds of the Past

A principal research need in historical geography is the creation of abstract worlds of the past. This study of agricultural settlement patterns in Upper Canada, 1782–1851, assesses the relative rank and sensitivity of land availability, point of entry, land quality, and distance to market in relation to a settler's decision to locate. Settlement patterns for years between 1782 and 1851 are simulated and compared to real world data by means of visual analysis of settlement maps and correlation analysis. For patterns before 1851 the dates of survey are important; by 1851 the effects of this factor are not evident.     

Cryptozoology in the Medieval and Modern Worlds

Historians of rural societies should consider using folklore sources in order to understand rural families in nineteenth-century France. A source like the stories collected from seventy-year-old Nannette Lévesque by the judge Victor Smith offers a very different viewpoint to depictions of such families by historians. Nannette was extremely poor, and spent her life moving between the mountain village where she was born in the Massif Central and the town of Saint-Étienne. Her stories call into question the reality of family “strategies” and the control of women by patriarchal authority, posited by some scholars of rural French family life.