Stretching the Evidence: An examination of the English Landscape through a Geographical Information System (GIS), 1573-1700.

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This study takes a new technical approach into landscape investigations focusing on three non-contiguous counties: Cornwall, Leicestershire and Norfolk to consider among other questions how the landscape pays differed between dissimilar geographical regions. The project is innovational in its use of GIS to map both the landscape and the literary observations within one model: presenting the results as a GIS dataset. The research will be further developed into a standalone web-based interactive map using the National Grid reference system. This study draws upon the work of two early English cartographers. Christopher Saxton's Atlas of the Counties of England and Wales 1573-1579 and John Speed's The theatre of the empire of Great Britaine published in 1603-1611. The development of Antiquarianism during the sixteenth century fulfilled the search for an English national identity in the form of county histories. Works penned by John Nichols and William Burton (Leicestershire), Francis Blomefield and Charles Parkin (Norfolk), and Richard Carew (Cornwall) will be analysed alongside the writings of William Camden, John Leyland, William Harrison and poet Michael Drayton for observations of the landscape. Combining data from cartographers, antiquarians, chorographers and poets whilst utilising new tools and methods offers a new area of research into landscape.The relationship between cartography and literary works has recently gained much attention. Donald Smith's examination of maps and literary texts investigated the impact geography had on perceptions in Stuart-Tudor England, termed 'the cartographic imagination'. Bernhard Klein examined the 'cartographic transaction', looking at cartographic history and the social and political space in maps. Andrew McRae considers literature in his examination of how the poets viewed the countryside during the process of enclosing. More recently, the Poly-Olbion project revisited the poetry of Michael Drayton to walk through the landscape of early modern England. Few quantitative studies using new technologies have been carried out on maps published by Christopher Saxton and John Speed. In 2011, David Bower examined the planimetric accuracy of the atlas map Anglia and the wall map Britannia. However, there has been no in-depth comparative investigation across selected county maps, and/or between both cartographers in tandem with literary writings under one study utilising GIS.Conjoining data gleaned from the digital analysis of these maps with earlier writings from the contemporary antiquarians and chorographers seeks to address research questions into: how the English landscape was perceived, portrayed and presented in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; offer further understanding of the technical processes, used and understood, by the cartographers in early modern mapping; consider how the cartographers and chorographers viewed and reported the landscape, unlocking their understanding of the natural world and revealing features unaccounted for by traditional methods of historical investigation. By employing a mixed-method, multidisciplinary methodology, it is anticipated the results derived from a qualitative and quantitative data-set will further research into English local landscape investigations. This study will thread a path between previous and current works whilst employing a wider range of sources utilising computer aided analysis.This data-integration approach will allow comparisons between writers, place, region and counties using a fully searchable dataset, thus seeking and extracting similarities and differences in the physical and perceived landscape. Furthermore, data can continually be added to expand the project for use in future landscape studies. Focusing on two cartographers and mapping contemporary literary observations in GIS allows for broad regional comparisons to be made across England and into physical and cultural links with the environment.