How, in the years prior to the advent of urban maps, did city residents conceptualize and navigate their communities? In this text, the author develops a method and a vocabulary for understanding how urban men and women thought about their personal geography. His research of property records of late-medieval Marseille leads him to conclude that its inhabitants charted their city, its social structure and their own identities within that structure through a set of cartographic grammars which powerfully shaped their lives. Prior to the 14th century, Daniel Lord Smail argues, different interest groups - notaries, officials, church officials, artisans - developed their own cartographies in accordance with their own social, political or administrative agendas. These competing templates were created around units ranging from streets and islands to vicinities and landmarks. Smail shows how the notarial template, which privileged the street as the most basic marker of address, gradually emerged as the cartographic norm. This transformation, he asserts, led to the rise of modern urban maps and helped to inaugurate the process whereby street addresses were attached to citizen identities, a crucial development in the larger enterprise of nation building. The work seeks to open up a powerful means for exploring late-medieval and Renaissance urban society while advancing understanding of the role of social perceptions in history.