Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain

Mapping has become a key term in current critical discourse, describing a particular cognitive mode of gaining control over the world, of synthesising cultural and geographical information, and of successfully navigating both physical and mental space. In this timely collection, an international team of renaissance scholars analyses the material practice behind this semiotic concept. By examining map-driven changes in gender identities, body conception, military practices, political structures, national imaginings, and imperial aspirations, the essays in this volume expose the multi-layered investments of historical ‘paper landscapes’ in the politics of space. Ranging widely across visual and textual artifacts implicated in the culture of mapping, from the literature of Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe and Jonson, to representations of body, city, nation and empire, Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space argues for a thorough reevaluation of the impact of cartography on the shaping of social and political identities in early modern Britain.

• Interdisciplinary study of the impact of cartography on many aspects of renaissance culture • Essays by specialists in literature, cartography, history and history of art • Well illustrated with 30 halftones of maps and paintings

List of illustrations; Preface; Notes on contributors; Introduction Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein; Part I. Contested Spaces: 1. Absorption and representation: mapping England in the early modern House of Commons Oliver Arnold; 2. A map of Greater Cambria Philip Schwyzer; 3. Britannia rules the waves?: images of Empire in Elizabethan England Lesley B. Cormack; 4. Performing London: the map and the city in ceremony Andrew Gordon; 5. Visible bodies: cartography and anatomy Caterina Albano; Part II. Literature and Landscape: 6. The scene of cartography in King Lear John Gillies; 7. Unlawful presences: the politics of military space and the problem of women in Tamburlaine Nina Taunton; 8. Marginal waters: Pericles and the idea of jurisdiction Bradin Cormack; 9. ‘On the famous voyage’: Ben Jonson and civic space Andrew McRae; 10. Imaginary journeys: Spenser, Drayton, and the poetics of national space Bernhard Klein; 11. Do real knights need maps? Charting moral, geographical and representational uncertainty in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene Joanne Woolway Grenfell; Epilogue: 12. The folly of maps and modernity Richard Helgerson; Select bibliography.