Mapping more than the world: Shaping the cartographic imagination in late medieval and early modern England (Edmund Spenser, Christopher Saxton, Christopher Marlowe, Sir Walter Ralegh, Andrew Marvell)

The focus of this dissertation is a consideration of the ways in which certain medieval and early modern maps in England in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries exercised forms of cultural control extending beyond the strictly geographical. These maps provided new cartographic ways of thinking about concerns of religion, nationalism, and subjectivity, and shaped what I call the English Cartographic Imagination.; In my first chapter I explore how the fifteenth-century saint's play, the Digby Mary Magdalen, worked to subvert the largely spiritual view of the world that defined maps in England at the time. By focusing both on Mary's spiritual pilgrimage and on the way the play foregrounds movement through geographical space, I reveal how this drama helped transform English perceptions of the world by making a place for geographical understanding within the spiritual paradigm of the medieval mappa mundi.; In the second chapter I juxtapose Spenser's Faerie Queene with the newly published maps of the counties of England and Wales by Christopher Saxton. I argue that Spenser uses elements of the classical art of memory and the new understanding of the mappable shape of the nation that Saxton's maps allow, to create a poetic Theatre of Memory which retrospectively imposes a new poetic past upon his country.; In my third chapter I look at Marlowe's Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus, and examine how the playwright creates a new means of exercising imaginative control over the world through geographical manipulation. Then I explore how this dramatic method of evoking geographical space provides a means of cartographic control for Sir Walter Ralegh in his exploration of Guiana.; In the last chapter I use an analysis of Marvell's “Bermudas” and “Upon Appleton House” to show how the terms and perspectives which enabled the European imagination to envision the New World also provided new ways of seeing the Old. I argue that, in “Upon Appleton House,” Marvell mirrors the perspectives and images of “Bermudas” in a way that invokes the mysteries of the New World, but then reinserts them into the Old.