Before the company: English perceptions of India in the sixteenth century

This thesis examines a number of the epistemological frameworks that the inhabitants of England used to comprehend the lands loosely denoted by the term India in the sixteenth century. It argues that in contradistinction to the experience of Europeans in the New World, the intellectual inheritances of both Antiquity and the Middle Ages provided these people with flexible and resilient structures that at once served to stimulate intense interest in the region but also furnished them with a series of overlapping but culturally comprehensible cognitive categories for the assimilation of new particular geographical intelligence.;The introduction begins with a broad survey of the most important classical and medieval sources accessible to readers in England in the sixteenth century that treat India in any depth. It then turns to describe the more significant attempts of English adventurers to reach these lands over the course of the century, situating them against developments on the continent. Chapter one is divided into two sections. It begins with a chronological assessment of sixteenth-century texts that treat the subject of India at length before turning to appraise sixteenth-century notions of geography . In so doing, it argues that space was often conceived as heterogeneous with specific places functioning as cognitive categories with predefined characteristics into which empirical observations could be assimilated. Taken together, these categories amount to a metageography for the ordering of spatial intelligence. After a review of the competing modern approaches to the problem of the east in the sixteenth century, chapter three investigates the first of these metageographies, that derived from scripture. It argues that not only did the eastern wealth described by scripture serve as a powerful lure, but contemporary exegetical practice meant that there were powerful theological reasons to maintain much of the fantastic hitherto associated with the region. Chapter four addresses the same issues but from the perspective of natural philosophy and secondary causes. It argues that regions might be construed as subsistent entities with defined characteristics based upon their location relative to the cardinal extremes. As such, those created things proper to India share an array of well-known diagnostic characteristics.