Introduction

The Introduction argues that in early modern Britain maps of sovereign power jostled against geographies of mundane resistance in ways that could marginalize bastions of social control. This spatial incongruity sprang from the practice of everyday life, through which consumers appropriated informational media in opportunistic ways. This chapter sets the scene for the rest of the book by showing that laureate poetry by writers such as Jonson and Spenser circulated alongside pocket maps and other forms of cheap print in public markets. Together, these texts inspired new paradigms of collectivity for a British society on the cusp of transitioning into a modern nation-state.

Milton’s Map of Liberty

Chapter 5 turns to Milton’s exploration of custom as it informs Britain’s ancient territories of civic liberty in A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle (1637/45). Milton’s poetic map of the uneasy lands around the Welsh border juxtaposes competing visions of the land as massive or minuscule with rival definitions of its character as a Crown holding or a distinct nation. Like the pocket cartography it physically resembles, the poet’s publication is a rebus that argues on both lexical and image-based levels for a British government whose magistrates serve as temperate and virtuous representatives of the commons, acting in relative autonomy within the polity.

Epilogue

The epilogue to this book reinforces the assertion that the physical scale of little maps, atlases, playing cards, and distance tables altered the very essence of what they represented. It synopsizes how pocket cartography and nation-building poetry together recalibrated the British topography to accommodate an expansive public, at a critical time when the nation was shifting from a realm to a commonwealth. It also explores the ramifications of current archiving systems and the scholarly practices associated with them, both of which tend to dismiss or conceal the material evidence of ordinary practitioners and their everyday practice in early modern Britain.

Daniel’s Imperial Survey

Chapter 2 contrasts Spenser’s affinity for the miniature with Samuel Daniel’s denigration of it. In his laureate poems, Daniel attempted to undermine the cheap county maps that provided an alternative geographic imaginary to James I’s royal unification of England with Scotland. To do so, he borrowed from the language of the survey, a privileged testing-ground for translating the national topography into a broadly comprehensible set of signifiers. Daniel’s chapbooks the Panegyrike Congratulatorie (1603) and the 1607 Funerall Poem both reject the egalitarian principles of practical surveying to instead map for James a magisterial imperial state. This interpretation offers a corrective to existing scholarship on the poet as a populist nationalist by arguing that his works articulated a deeply hierarchical view of the realm. I contrast Daniel’s geographical elitism with John Norden’s accessible pocket-sized guides and surveying manuals circulating in the commonwealth culture of the Inns of Court.

Jonson’s Broken Compasses and Bit Parts

Chapter 3 turns to Ben Jonson’s first laureate chapbook, His Part (1604), written for James I’s first royal entrance into London. Here, Jonson imagines the Inns of Court as a lodestone that disrupts the imperial compass marking the king as the pole star of the state. Instead, Jonson points to the ordinary people at the center of the king’s newly conjoined realm. Jonson’s poems measure the commonwealth according to the standards of civic identity in ways that anticipate the practicality of the numeric distance tables in Norden’s Intended Guyde (1624). An archival discovery of King James’s personal copy of the Guyde also shows the presence of popular cartography at the highest spheres of British governance, and offers a fresh perspective on the kinds of geographical knowledge shaping the intersections of space, place, and national identity in the early seventeenth century.

Spenser’s Miniature Map of Faerie

Chapter 1 reads Spenser’s 1590 Faerie Queene in light of the miniature cartographic aesthetic exemplified by William Bowes’s 1590 county playing cards. I show that in the poem, which earned Spenser a pension from Elizabeth I, Amoret’s cut-up body represents in microcosm the imperial dissection of England and Wales by Christopher Saxton’s 1579 royally-funded county atlas. The romance heroine’s small size and unadorned beauty, which closely parallel the raw aesthetic of cheap maps, reveal the miniature’s potential to resist monarchical illusions of grandeur. This aesthetic reappears in Spenser’s descriptions of the Thames in Prothalamion (1596), as well as of Irish rebels resisting English colonization in the 1596 Vewe of the Present State of Irelande. In both, Spenser’s engagement with the geographic imaginary of small-format cartography complicates scholarly assumptions about the poet’s nationalism.

Davenant’s Numerical Nationhood

Chapter 4 begins by placing Davenant’s first laureate chapbook Madagascar (1638) into conversation with the popular pocket atlases of the 1620s and 1630s to argue that the poet’s imagistic “Numbers” map links between geographical precision and societal betterment. As he argues in his Discourse on Gondibert (his Sidneian defense of poesy), Davenant believed that the numerical structure of poetry could speak to a broad public sphere defined by its constituents’ numeracy, at a time when numbers were emerging as a prime language for measuring the shifting British landscape. Davenant’s royalist carto-poiesis reemerges in his chart of London as the “Royall city” in King Charles his Augusta (1648) on the eve of the regicide. His work to remap monarchical prerogative onto the national topography constituted a deliberate challenge to the geographic imaginary of the small-format cartography which pervaded the popular culture of mid-seventeenth-century Britain.