Katarzyna Lecky explores how early modern British poets paid by the state adapted inclusive modes of nationhood charted by inexpensive, small-format maps. She explores chapbooks ('cheapbooks') by Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Ben Jonson, William Davenant, and John Milton alongside the portable cartography circulating in the same retail print industry. Domestic pocket maps were designed for heavy use by a broad readership that included those on the fringes of literacy. The era's de facto laureates all banked their success as writers appealing to this burgeoning market share by drawing the nation as the property of the commonwealth rather than the Crown. This book investigates the accessible world of small-format cartography as it emerges in the texts of the poets raised in the expansive public sphere in which pocket maps flourished. It works at the intersections of space, place, and national identity to reveal the geographical imaginary shaping the flourishing business of cheap print. Its placement of poetic economies within mainstream systems of trade also demonstrates how cartography and poetry worked together to mobilize average consumers as political agents. This everyday form of geographic poiesis was also a strong platform for poets writing for monarchs and magistrates when their visions of the nation ran counter to the interests of the government.

Their principal objective is to explore the ways in which maps have interacted with society in England's past, to analyse the roles that maps have played and the uses to which they have been put. It is often a story of discontinuity rather than evolution, but the authors recognise many connections across the centuries, at the same time seeking to avoid too insular a view noting the influence of ongoing intellectual and cartographic developments in the rest of Europe."--BOOK JACKET.

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.