"This book ... is concerned to open up some of the conditioning factors which reveal the concerns of the ecclesiastical authorities for the formal representation of Marian teaching. The following chapters aim to show how the Marian altarpiece was responsive both to developments in dogma and to major stylistic changes in the course of the period 1320-1630. These changes were grounded in the visual strategies by which the spatial and lighting systems of the painting reflected those of the viewer, so as to impart to the painted image the convition of reality derived from sensory experience. The book makes a distinction between the theological and the cult image in order to isolate those aspects of Marian devotion which the Church embraced as doctrinally important."--Preface, p. xii.

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.