The early modern map has come to mark the threshold of modernity, cutting through the layered customs of Medieval parochialism with its clean, expansive geometries. Re-thinking the role played by mathematics and cartography in the English seventeenth century, this book argues that the cultural currency of mathematics was as unstable in the period as that of England's controversial enclosures and plantations. Reviewing evidence from a wide range of literary and scientific; courtly and pragmatic texts, Edwards suggests that its unstable currency rendered mathematics necessarily rhetorical: subject to constant re-negotiation. Yet he also finds a powerful flexibility in this weakness. Mathematized texts from masques to maps negotiated a contemporary ambivalence between Calvinist asceticism and humanist engagement. Their authors promoted themselves as artful guides between virtue and profit; the study and the marketplace. This multi-disciplinary work will be of interest to all disciplines affected by the recent 'spatial turn' in early modern cultural studies, and particularly to students and researchers in literature, history and geography.

Working from a cultural studies perspective, author D. K. Smith here examines a broad range of medieval and Renaissance maps and literary texts to explore the effects of geography on Tudor-Stuart cultural perceptions. He argues that the literary representation of cartographically-related material from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth century demonstrates a new strain, not just of geographical understanding, but of cartographic manipulation, which he terms, "the cartographic imagination." Rather than considering the effects of maps themselves on early modern epistemologies, Smith considers the effects of the activity of mapping-the new techniques, the new expectations of accuracy and precision which developed in the sixteenth century-on the ways people thought and wrote. Looking at works by Spenser, Marlowe, Raleigh, and Marvell among other authors, he analyzes how the growing ability to represent physical space accurately brought with it not just a wealth of new maps, but a new array of rhetorical techniques, metaphors, and associations which allowed the manipulation of texts and ideas in ways never before possible.

"Drawing from both current historical interpretations and new interdisciplinary perspectives, this collection provides diverse approaches to understanding the multilayered exchanges that went into creating cartographic knowledge in and about the Americas. In the introduction, editor Martin Brückner provides a critical assessment of the concept of cartography and of the historiography of maps. The individual essays, then, range widely over space and place, from the imperial reach of Iberian and British cartography to indigenous conceptualizations, including "dirty," ephemeral maps and star charts, to demonstrate that pre-nineteenth-century American cartography was at once a multiform and multicultural affair. The essays also bring to light original archives and innovative methodologies for investigating spatial relations among peoples in the Western Hemisphere." --from the publisher.

The Cartographic Revolution in the Renaissance made maps newly precise, newly affordable, and newly ubiquitous. In sixteenth-century Britain, cartographic materials went from rarity to household décor within a single lifetime, and they delighted, inspired, and fascinated people across the socioeconomic spectrum. At the same time, they also unsettled, upset, disturbed, and sometimes angered their early modern readers. Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Cartographic Anxiety is the first monograph dedicated to recovering the shadow history of the many anxieties provoked by early modern maps and mapping in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A product of a military arms race, often deployed for security and surveillance purposes, and fundamentally distortive of their subjects, maps provoked suspicion, unease, and even hostility in early modern Britain (in ways not dissimilar from the anxieties provoked by global positioning-enabled digital mapping in the twenty-first century). At the same time, writers saw in the resistance to cartographic logics and strategies the opportunity to rethink the way literature represents space—and everything else. This volume explores three major poems of the period—Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion (1612, 1622), and John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667, 1674)—in terms of their vexed and vexing relationships with cartographic materials, and shows how the productive protest staged by these texts redefined concepts of allegory, description, personification, bibliographic materiality, narrative, temporality, analogy, and other elemental components of literary representations.

Theories of performativity have garnered considerable attention within the social sciences and humanities over the past two decades. At the same time, there has also been a growing recognition that the social production of space is fundamental to assertions of political authority and the practices of everyday life. However, comparatively little scholarship has explored the full implications that arise from the confluence of these two streams of social and political thought. This is the first book-length, edited collection devoted explicitly to showcasing geographical scholarship on the spatial politics of performativity. It offers a timely intervention within the field of critical human geography by exploring the performativity of political spaces and the spatiality of performative politics. Through a series of geographical case studies, the contributors to this volume consider the ways in which a performative conception of the "political" might reshape our understanding of sovereignty, political subjectification, and the production of social space. Marking the 20th anniversary of the publication of Judith Butler’s classic, Bodies That Matter (1993), this edited volume brings together a range of contemporary geographical works that draw exciting new connections between performativity, space, and politics.

Edmund Spenser and the romance of space seeks to gauge the roles that aesthetic subjectivity and the imagination play in early modern spatial and textual practices.

This study considers how a range of prose texts register, and help to shape, the early modern cultural debate between theoretical and experiential forms of knowledge as centered on the subject of travel.