'Cartography and the Craft of English Prose, 1605-1670'

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My thesis contends that the history of seventeenth-century prose and its development can be productively retold alongside the history of contemporary cartography and the rich interest which it held for many authors. Successively reformulated by critics such as Morris Croll, R.F. Jones, Stanley Fish, Joan Webber, and Ian Robinson, the history of early modern prose has shown a progressive struggle by authors to establish a distinct mode of writing in the vernacular, in an effort to make prose simultaneously 'English', learned, and contemporary. By attending to the specifics of the metaphorical language, book and map-ownership, and educational backgrounds of a handful of authors, I show how the language and material of early modern cartography offered a number of ways of thinking through the problems which the composition of prose presented. The broad contour of my thesis follows the work of four authors: Francis Bacon, Robert Burton, Thomas Fuller, and Margaret Cavendish. Each of these authors is the focus of a single chapter, outlining the unique circumstances of their engagement with the diverse field of cartography. I begin with Bacon, showing how his metaphors of mapping tended towards a goal shared by figurative language and cartography: to produce enargeia, or a vivid, lifelike quality of imagery, alongside energeia, or a 'stir to the mind' which provoked the reader to further thought or action. These paired functions were attributed to both mapping and metaphor in Bacon's educational background, and in the context of his later work their doubled force offered a means by which Bacon could exhort his readership to engage with his 'Great Instauration', as he 'plotted' the future of scientific progress. As such, I attempt to refute the idea that the connection of prose to mapping is 'just' metaphorical, by showing that metaphor was in fact a central aspect to many authors' conception of prose's real-world impact. I have spent the first year of my DPhil writing this chapter, and in the process have accrued a connected set of materials towards the thesis's introduction. My second chapter aligns Robert Burton's family connections to cartography and his extensive collection of maps with his tendency to analogise the form of The Anatomy of Melancholy with various geographical concepts. Previous work on The Anatomy has stressed Burton's reading of 'universal' world maps, and their emphasis of a neo-Stoic, catascopic method of approaching the world. I argue that the records of Burton's life and library show a more localised, granular, and worldly taste in cartography, which can accordingly change our readings of Burton's geographical imagery. This updated view of Burton's taste in maps allows a more current conception of Burton's text in line with critics such as Stephanie Shirilan, who has shown that neo-Stoic detachment is in fact a relatively minor element in Burton's philosophical and compositional style. This chapter is based on my MSt thesis, and an article on Burton's map-books is forthcoming in Renaissance Studies. My final two chapters, projected to be written in my second and third years, are on Thomas Fuller and Margaret Cavendish. I show how Fuller used biblical maps to project a post-Revolutionary 'moderation', showing the actual, physical territory of the Holy Land as a tonic to abstract figurations of the 'New Jerusalem', and how this characteristic 'moderation' was a shared product of Fuller's prose-style and map-production. I then show how Cavendish used the image of the 'globe' as a distinctly subjective, multi-scalar, and polyvalent device for literary play, in direct refutation of the paired injunctions to accurate mapping and 'plain style' advocated by the Royal Society. In all of these chapters, I stress that cartography held relevance for these authors as a 'craft': as a collection of materially and agentially complex processes which moved beyond questions of simple geographic representation and ratio