Geography has been for too long a hidden dimension of literary studies, compared to history. This is all the more surprising since historians have long seen the two as complementary: geography is the other side of history as space is the other side of time. Especially the work of the French Annals school of history springs to mind: Lucien Febvre, Fernand Braudel and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie are cultural geographers as much as historians. And it is thought-provoking that while literary scholars have feared to tread on geographical ground, scared perhaps that it would give way to Montesquieu's theory of climatic zones, National Romanticism, or even Blut und Boden, it is a materialist historian like Braudel who is left to complain that 'we have museum catalogues, but no artistic atlases').