Notaries in fifteenth-century Marseilles simply devised their own ways to describe the identities of the people they recorded. “The use of the address, the practice of attaching identity to residence is,” he concludes, “a condition of modernity.” The state had to understand its society, to identify its subjects, before it could do anything to shape it. Before house numbers, the dark, shuttered houses and the unmapped streets hid the population away. In books, we read words; in cities, we read street names and house numbers. Before they addressed houses, governments were blind to who their
...more
