ABSTRACT
Mental topographies describe spaces of communication and experience operating independently of national or geographical boundaries, uniting a set of people with common interests and providing conduits of information, whether in the context of Humanism, later the republic of letters, the Latinate church or university, or the world of the European courts and dynastic families. The realm of the courts and spaces of kinship and the methods used to portray and reinforce a foreign consort’s kinship networks in letters form the focus of this chapter, exploring how various actors mapped and re-mapped themselves in dynamic relations.
