Maps and the Writing of Space in Early Modern England and Ireland

Maps make the world visible, but they also obscure, distort, idealize. This study offers a fresh account of the mental and material mapping of early modern England and Ireland, showing how Renaissance geographical thought had a profound impact on the formation of social and cultural identities. Cartography served both the rhetoric of nationhood and the ideology of conquest: it could both exhibit or deny the existence of political and cultural difference. Through a detailed analysis of the representational tools with which space was measured, visualized and narrated, this book traces the conceptual struggles attendant on the early modern culture of mapping, disclosing important patterns of cultural change. Drawing on recent work in in critical cartographic history, literary criticism, and the theory of space, the book ranges widely across maps, cosmographical works, historical and political writing, and the literary works of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Spenser and Drayton.