In his masterwork The Sources of Social Power, Michael Mann defined power ‘in its most general sense’ as ‘the ability to pursue and attain goals through mastery of one's environment’. Mann was reading ‘environment’ more broadly than in purely geographical terms but geography still played an important part in this definition. In recent decades, a swathe of scholarly work has pursued the link between places and political phenomena. One work, in a volume for the Transformation of the Roman World project, entitled Topographies of Power in the Early Middle Ages, highlights this issue well for the purposes of the present investigation. ‘Central places’, according to the editors of that volume, should not be defined by ‘the exclusively institutional and economic meanings which have burdened this concept’. Such places defy categorisation as ‘either political, religious, institutional, social or economic. They were all of this at the same time.’

Taking into account the religious, institutional, social, and economic meaning of places, central and otherwise, the aim of this short chapter is to establish the geographical significance of political phenomena, bringing in the more specific detail of topography as part of the establishment of a rationale and methodology for the volume as a whole. The chapter begins with discussion of the significance of place and landscape in the central Middle Ages, including both the ways in which contemporary sources recorded places and the ways in which modern scholars discuss these issues. There follows a consideration of the manner in which the perceptions of places and landscape have been investigated more broadly, including in related disciplines such as geography, where the phenomenon of the ‘contested space’ has been established, and archaeology. Such investigations include phenomenological readings of landscape and lieux de mémoire, as well as more conventional readings of geographical proximity. Although it is not my intention to take an exclusively geographical approach to the ‘landscapes’ (both literal and figurative) associated with acts of opposition in this book, the chapter concludes with observations on how the perceptual approaches to medieval place and landscape can be applied.