Overview
Published from 1607-1627 in France, the complex tapestry that is the Astrée intertwines hundreds of characters with aesthetic and philosophical ideas popular during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Spanning five volumes, the novel was hugely popular with the reading public at the time though its appeal has been lost to the modern reader due to its complex plot points and encyclopedic length. This collaborative project between a faculty member and undergraduate research assistant seeks to elucidate the novel, particularly the way in which the author, Honore d’Urfé, breaks with the literary conventions of the pastoral mode and sets his novel not in an idealized representation of Arcadia, but rather in the very real and tangible Forez region in south-central France, home of his family estate and his own fond memories from childhood. D’Urfé’s emphasis on geography has led to our own interest in analyzing the link between the real and the imaginary in geographical depiction. Using digital humanities tools and methodology, we are creating a map of the physical locations mentioned in the novel that overlays the character stories and mythical allusions. Mapping the real elements of the story will enable an analysis of the interplay of the real and the imagined in D’Urfé’s work. While recent scholarship has clarified the numerous intertextual references, our intervention seeks to visualize the correlation between the geographic setting and the fictional allusions to clarify the importance of geographic specificity in the work as a whole.
Method
The investigators met throughout the fall semester. Utilizing a combination of close reading practices and various digital textual analysis and visualization tools, the researchers developed an approach to the project. Beginning with book 12, the researchers uploaded the text to Voyant Tools to get a preliminary idea of the text's characteristics (we capitalized on the immense work done by Dr. Eglal Henein to create a .doc of the first three parts of the Astrée and available on her website, Deux visages de L'Astrée). Our next step was to complete close readings of the book, taking notes and researching the references to location. We also noted the narrative level at which locations were mentioned. We then designed our spreadsheets so that we could represent the information about location in tabular form, focusing on identifying locations mentioned and aligning them with their real-world coordinates. After multiple iterations of the spreadsheets as we refined the process and defined more clearly the data we really sought to highlight, we uploaded them to Google Maps and color-coded the layers so that they could be easily identified. The map itself may be found on the next page under "Map & Output." We also input the spreadsheet from book 12 to RAWGraphs in order to tease out the prevalence of different types of geographical referents to determine the level of specificity and the importance of various types of geographical information in different narrative levels. Upon completion of this work with book 12, we went back and completed the same process with books 1, 2, and 3 to test our hypotheses from our analysis of book 12 and to determine whether or not the same findings held at the beginning of the novel as at the end. We are hopeful that, in the future, we may complete the full analysis of the entirety of the novel.