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Katarzyna Lecky, Pocket Maps and Public Poetry in the English Renaissance
by Willy Maley

Katarzyna Lecky, Pocket Maps and Public Poetry in the English Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. x, 277pp. ISBN 9780198834694. £60.00 hardback. 

With this intense, densely argued monograph, Katarzyna Lecky has put the new Oxford Early Modern Literary Geographies series firmly on the map and embodied its remit of publishing work that is ‘innovative and agenda-setting’. Lecky covers considerable ground in five richly referenced chapters on Spenser, Daniel, Jonson, Davenant and Milton. Each author-focused chapter is a highly-wrought self-standing study – almost a pocket monograph – and for that reason, and given the interests of this journal, I will focus here on the book’s formidable first chapter, ‘Spenser’s Miniature Map of Faerie’, which marks a major contribution to our understanding of the politics of space and place in Spenser studies.

Critics have addressed Spenser’s miniaturist practice in other forms, but Lecky brings something fresh to the table, homing in on the ways in which the advent of ‘small-format cartography’ transformed contemporary perceptions of landscape as well as mindscape.[1] Lecky’s opening gambit is impressive. Her suggestion is that a set of contemporary cartographic playing cards can inform a reading of Spenser’s epic, as a poem equally preoccupied with a scaled-down geography of the local, and she sets out from there to demonstrate ‘Spenser’s cartographic articulation of the natural limits of the monarch in relation to her realm’ (73). This is one of two key claims she makes in the course of chapter: that Spenser was a poet against Empire, and that the wide circulation of pocket maps meant that an early modern readership had a much better grasp of geography than has hitherto been acknowledged.[2] The two claims are linked insofar as pocket maps, like Spenser’s poetry, are seen to challenge imperial ambition:

The negative space of pocket maps resisted overladen visions of the British nation generated by the Elizabethan government and illustrated in [Christopher] Saxton’s atlas. The blank spaces of pocket maps effaced those sovereign symbols to return the landscape to a state prior to historical conditioning, and a plenitude cleansed of its ruling structures. (49)

This fits with Spenser’s return to colonial pastoral at the end of his imperial epic, in the Mutabilitie Cantos, but there is still much here that is perplexing. How do we square ‘the British nation’ with ‘the Elizabethan government’, and exactly what sort of erasure of sovereignty or structures is taking place? Questions arise concerning the status of ‘Britain’ as a ‘nation’ – as opposed to an imperial union in formation – and the extent to which the maps that Lecky discusses are really British rather than English. ‘What ish my Nation?’, as Macmorris asks.

To take the author’s second claim first, that the increasing availability of maps subverted state power by disseminating cartographic knowledge beyond sovereign control: ‘If maps are instruments of power’, Lecky tells us, ‘they were often found in the pockets of ordinary people’ (37). The case for the widespread ownership of, or access to, maps is asserted throughout the chapter, on the basis that cheap and compact cartographic materials allowed for unprecedented public access to the culture of mapping: ‘Designed for heavy use by a broad audience, they invited even the illiterate to read them’ (37). Or again: ‘The contraction allowing a nation to fit into a library made great things small, while the push to make this experience accessible to a broad audience made small things greater’ (45). Cartographic playing cards and epic poetry come together in a shared democratic impulse: ‘Amoret’s small stature and unadorned beauty invoke the little maps of Spenser’s day to offer an aesthetic of the miniature accessible to the many rather than the few’ (51).[3] This accessibility is shared, we are told, by the first edition of The Faerie Queene. According to Lecky: ‘The inclusive nature of Spenser’s message matched its affordable published form’, since ‘material evidence places Spenser’s book among pocketable publications’ (52). This is one of many intriguing observations that force the reader to rethink the idea of epic and of The Faerie Queene as a weighty work in physical terms – either that or we imagine a coat with very big pockets.

Three figures appear as key individuals in Lecky’s exploration of Spenser’s literary landscape: William Bowes, John Norden and Pieter van den Keere. Lecky first shows her hand by drawing our attention to an exemplary case of small-format cartography, the publication in 1590 of a set of playing cards by William Bowes that frame the Tudor state (excluding Ireland). Bowes, whose cartographic playing cards, ‘representing the fifty-two counties of England and Wales’, appeared the same year as the first three books of The Faerie Queene, provides the perfect foil for Lecky’s intricate analysis of Spenser’s miniaturist poetics:

A mere 9.5 cm by 5.7 cm in size, these cards represent the fifty-two counties of England and Wales. They were engraved by Augustine Ryther, the same craftsman who engraved several of the plates in Saxton’s massive atlas of England and Wales that also entered the retail market in 1590. However, unlike the Saxton atlas, the Bowes cards are stripped of extraneous ornamentation.  They simply offer the location of the county’s boundaries and its shire town (marked by the first letter of its name), rivers, and a few skeletal natural landmarks such as forests and mountains. A separate card holds a key to the symbols denoting various market towns (whether they have a cathedral or a castle, for example), while additional cards offer a brief history of London as well as the commonwealth in general. They total sixty cards to a deck. Bowes reissued these cards in 1595 and published a more elaborate set in 1605, which suggests their popularity. (41)

Although the cards represent England and Wales, we are informed that ‘For Bowes […] England is firmly English’ (43). Lecky seems to suggest that ‘England and Wales’ was an unproblematic coupling. In fact, mapping Wales was a contested cartographic practice in the period.

Philip Schwyzer, for example, has drawn attention to Welsh antiquarian Humphrey Llwyd’s 1573 map with its stunning reversal of English encroachment, and its three-fold division foreshadowing in miniature Shakespeare’s two famous onstage maps: 

Here Wales, or Cambria, is divided into its three traditional regions, Gwynedd, Deheubarth, and Powys – none of which had possessed a political existence for several centuries – and the eastern border of Powys is the river Severn. Through this audacious cartographical land-grab, Wales is made to extend as far as Worcester and Tewkesbury, at some points more than doubling in width. While the representation of physical geography is faulty in many respects – particularly in the depiction of the cartographer’s native North Wales – and the delineation of boundaries apparently anachronistic and fanciful, there is no denying the enduring appeal of Llwyd’s map, which was reprinted nearly fifty times in continental and English editions of the atlases of Ortelius, Mercator, Jannson and Horn, including cheap epitomes.[4]

Cheap epitomes are what interest Lecky. What interested Shakespeare was the way in which maps were all about division and realpolitik. Henry IV, Part I provides one of two uses of maps as stage props depicting the division of Britain into its constituent parts. Foreshadowing Lear’s ‘darker purpose’ – ‘Give me the map there’ (1.1.35) – Shakespeare has Glendower declare:

Come, here is the map. Shall we divide our right
According to our threefold order ta’en? (1HIV 3.1.68-9)

Mortimer then makes the division:

All westward, Wales beyond the Severn shore
And all the fertile land within that bound,
To Owain Glyndŵr. (74-6)

Later, in her discussion of Comus in the chapter on Milton, Lecky introduces the publisher George Humble (fl.1603-1640), whose ‘Description of Wales’ in his 1627 octavo ‘miniature Speed’ entitled England Wales Scotland and Ireland (212) repeats the tale of the tripartite division of Britain only to acknowledge the cultural divide between England and Wales. As Lecky notes, in this account: ‘The Welsh define themselves and their culture in ways sundered from their adoptive identity as British subjects under an English Crown’ (214). Here, by contrast, the Britishness of the Welsh is not their own ancient Britishness but subjection to England. Bowes’ playing cards, in their effortless coupling of England and Wales, are playing with history, and a history that was being rehearsed and debated in the 1590s.

The cartographic cards dealt out by Bowes ‘appealed to a broad audience’, we are told (45), appearing as ‘the first British county atlas created for a retail market’ (50). According to Lecky: ‘Miniaturization was key to this populist enjoyment’ (43). Reading Lecky on Bowes is like watching a card trick such is her expert handling of the material. The claims she makes for the impact of this deck do not always stack up, though, as when she states that ‘each participant who played a game with the Bowes cards became in effect a shareholder in this miniaturized nation, who held a “portion of ownership” in the British landscape’ (50). This large claim is reinforced in the suggestion that the hand played by Bowes was part of the ‘geographies of resistance […] that could marginalize elite bastions of social control’ (50).

The comparison between Bowes’ cards and Spenser’s cantos can also be taken too far, as when Lecky suggests that Arthegall (rather than the communist giant) is a true anti-tyrannical figure:

The knight diverges from the “certain stead” to save the disadvantaged groups on whom the Bowes cards also focus. As he works against power systems that oppress the small in service to the great, Arthegall personifies the commonwealth values that fuel the Bowes cards as well as Britomart’s imaginary geography. (58)

Here, ‘commonwealth values’ and colonial values appear to cohere, and perhaps that is not so far-fetched. The troubling topography of Talus is not discussed, and this feels like an overly generous interpretation of Spenser’s Knight of Justice.

‘Bowes’ will ring bells with Spenserians and have them scurrying to check his relations. The British Library’s note on the Bowes playing cards offers a hint: ‘The identity of W. B. has long been debated, but it was discovered (by Mann and Kingsley) that a William Bowes is associated with a later pack of playing cards produced in 1605, who was the brother of a Ralph Bowes, who was granted a license to import playing cards in 1578’.[5]

But was William in fact the cousin rather than the brother of Ralph, who was in turn the son of Robert Bowes of Spenser fame? This name sent me to a key source for early modern biography beyond the ODNB. Spenserians are familiar with Robert Bowes (d.1597), English ambassador to Scotland, from two letters he wrote to Lord Burghley on 1 and 12 November 1596 concerning James VI’s displeasure at the depiction of his late mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, as Duessa in the ‘Ferry Queene’ by ‘Edward Spenser’.[6] Not too familiar, though, as a  letter of 1598 concerning Spenser is attributed to ‘a servant of Bowes’, by which time Robert had shot his bow.[7] Spenserians are certainly less acquainted with Robert’s son Ralph Bowes (d.1623), or with his nephew Sir William Bowes (d.1611). All three served as Members of Parliament and their lives are recorded in the history of that institution.[8] Confusion arises in part because Robert was succeeded by his nephew William in a quick reshuffle of the diplomatic corps, so that the correspondence concerning Spenser in 1596 and 1598 is tied with a double bow. If this same William was the author of that loaded deck of cards then that would be a neat knot untied.

And it is easy to get tied in knots over the Bowes family, but the parliamentary records offer some further clues. What is certain is that members of the family were experts in border warfare and had considerable experience of the Anglo-Scottish frontier. The Bowes family should be better known because Robert’s sister Marjory Bowes (d.c.1560) married John Knox, with whom she had two sons, and the correspondence of Robert’s nephew, Sir William Bowes, contains some remarkable commentary on the Gowrie Conspiracy.[9] As an Anglo-Scottish dynasty, they were clearly major cross-border players. William Bowes was the son of Sir George Bowes (1527-1580), who, according to Robert’s ODNB biographer ‘acted as Elizabeth I’s marshal in the suppression of the northern rising of 1569-70’.[10] Furthermore, in one of many suggestive asides, Lecky – citing the work of Michael Murrin – envisages the Redcrosse Knight tracing the steps of agents of the Muscovy Company, which for a reader considering the Bowes family conjures up the figure of Elizabeth’s Russian ambassador, Sir Jerome Bowes (54).[11] 

Throughout Pocket Maps and Public Poetry, there are issues of class, literacy and readership that lead us down into a forest of footnotes evidencing painstaking scholarship on Lecky’s part. The case for maps as ‘malleable representations of the country created by a broad public’ is forcefully made, but the question of access and ownership remains rather obscure, as does the issue of which ‘country’ is in question (40). Lecky’s turn of phrase – and indeed her writing as a whole – is so precise and persuasive that she is able to make sweeping statements in tiny brushstrokes. Like Spenser’s paradoxical aim – ‘To blazon broad emongst her learned throng’ – Lecky’s argument for breadth of audience through ownership of specialist publications is achieved through a poetic brevity, a kind of critical compression, that makes reading her prose a hypnotic delight. When she says of The Faerie Queene (Book Three) that ‘In Cantos XI and XII, the heart becomes the majestic miniscule that resists the grandiosity of Empire’, the economy and impact of the sentence almost blinds us to the extent to which it is more assertion than analysis (57). And as is often the case with this brilliant, bristling book this nutshell remark is subsequently embellished: the image of the heart opens out again to a grand claim suggesting the general privileging of the local over the global:

The romance heroine’s heart is a microcosm of a nation that stands in opposition to the Castle’s empty grandeur: it mirrors the living body politic in all its fullness. Her heart’s diminutive status does not diminish its ontological force. Instead, this tiny realm encompasses the majesty of the imperial state in ways that bind Cupid’s sovereign vision of Faerie within an overarching frame of a romance topography that is macroscopic precisely because it is minuscule. The paradox of Amoret’s heart also mimics the fecund contradiction of the Bowes cards, which contain worlds within their small spaces. One instance of this containment emerges in the card representing Middlesex, the shire that contained the proximate cities of London and Westminster. The image of this shire – which resembles a heart set apart from the rest of the English landscape – incorporates the city even as it neglects to mark its royal neighbor. (60)

This is arguably too much weight for one small heart to bear, but Lecky gets a great deal of mileage out of the case for miniaturist poetics as anti-imperialist politics: ‘The romance of the miniscule triumphs over the majesty of empire’ (62). Spenser emerges again and again as a poet against Empire precisely because his epic poem is focused on local resistance to larger cultural and political formations:

As Spenser privileges the pocket-sized heart of the romance heroine over the majesty of the imperial agents who would subdue it, the poet teaches his readers to love the tiny rather than be intimidated by the great. He offers his audience an intimate nation instead of a dread state. (62)

But what is this intimate nation? Lecky states that ‘in 1590 the poet opens the microcosmic book of romance to trace a map of Britain for the enjoyment of its ordinary denizens’ (62). Where is Ireland in this map? Lecky’s focus on the heart of England at times obscures the full resonance of Spenser’s Irish location, so that when she brings in the cartographer John Norden (c.1547-1625) it is to home in on Surrey:

Although there is no material evidence connecting Norden to Spenser directly, in his description of the River Mole Spenser depicts in text what Norden depicts in image. The surveyor’s 1594 map of Surrey is the first to depict the Mole’s underground course that Spenser describes (Camden’s 1607 and Drayton’s 1612 versions showing the same subterranean river being too late for Spenser to reference). This resonance suggests that the poet saw a manuscript of the surveyor’s work. (61)

The Mole has of course been viewed as part of Spenser’s Irish topography.[12] According to Andrew Hadfield: ‘Mole is the name Spenser gives to the Ballyhoura Hills that overlook his estate from the north, and Mulla is the Awbeg, named here from the ancient name for Buttevant, Kilnemullah’.[13] John Norden is known to those of us working on early modern Ireland as the architect of three maps in 1607-8 as part of the preparations for the Ulster Plantation, successor to the Munster enterprise.[14] There is no evidence that Norden was in Ireland earlier than this, or that he was involved in mapping Munster in the 1580s, but since accounts of his early life are scant the possibility remains that he had in fact crossed paths with Spenser.

One mapmaker who did undoubtedly impact directly on Spenser and a card Lecky pulls out of her sleeve with a dramatic flourish is Pieter Van den Keere (1571-1646), a Dutch cartographer whose octavo map of Munster is undoubtedly a fascinating find (67).[15] Here the question of portability assumes a different character, as a portable plan of the plantation in that province would be extremely useful for English settlers and soldiers. In this context the miniature would not be anti-colonial but quite the reverse. In this manifestation small-form cartography begins to look more like the ‘ambulatory map’ that enabled travel, exploration and settlement.[16]

Yet Lecky insists that size matters for another reason, and that the preference for small measures is above all about resistance to overweening political structures:

The final three books published in the 1596 edition of The Faerie Queene have become associated with the anti-Irish sentiment expressed in Spenser’s View. However, Spenser’s aesthetic use of miniaturization to combat empire in the Busirane episode also returns to complicate current readings of Spenser as an unflinching advocate of England’s violent subjugation of Ireland. (69-70) 

Miniaturisation cuts both ways, as this episode amply illustrates with a rare use of ‘pocket’:

A murderous knife out of his pocket drew,
The which he thought, for villeinous despight
In her tormented bodie to embrew. (III.xii.32-5-7)

Pockets can be problematic, and they can be picked; being pocket-sized is no guarantee of goodness.

Two slips on the same page confirm that Elizabethan Ireland is not Lecky’s strong point. First she alludes to Spenser’s ‘eyewitnessing of mass starvation during the Ulster famine’, rather than Munster, and then refers to Lord Grey’s recall ‘[b]y 1596’, when Grey was recalled in 1582 and dead by 1593 (70). These missteps do not detract from the scrupulousness of Lecky’s scholarship overall, but they do indicate that in her admirable efforts to rescue Spenser’s reputation from simplistic readings of his Irish experiences she occasionally strays into unknown territory. This is compounded by the conflation of English colonial activity in Ireland with English domestic land disputes:

at this time Ireland was not a clearly defined place but rather a space riddled with competing claims regarding land ownership and territorial liberties. The colonial realm was charted by power struggles that often manifested themselves as violent property disputes between colonizers and colonized. As in England, these battles played out in cartographic arguments. Spenser was himself mapped as a Munster landowner by Francis Jobsen [sic] circa 1590, on the estate that would later be retaken by the Irish. (71) 

Francis Jobson did indeed map Spenser’s estate, which ‘would later be retaken by the Irish’, or rather the Old English, and Jobson’s preferred instrument of surveying could be pocketed but also drawn out more than twenty yards. In October 1587, ‘Jobson recorded 121,931 acres measured by himself, much of it with his precision instrument, the sixty-six foot wire line’.[17]

As the chapter on Spenser draws to a close, Lecky begins to abandon the subtlety of some of her more meticulous and ingenious readings in favour of a more familiar binary:

The fact that the colonial war was enforced by struggles over maps likely resonated with the author whose sophisticated geospatial imaginary shaped both his epic poem and his genocidal treatise. Spenser’s middling upbringing led him to straddle the two worlds of the court and the commons in his efforts at social advancement. In Ireland, his middling status made him again straddle the two spheres of English and Irish identity, each fighting to encompass a single landscape. (71)

When Lecky suggests that ‘A View, like his revision of the Busirane episode in The Faerie Queene, is a vexed social commentary by a disenfranchised writer torn by competing alliances’, we are back in the domain of Spenser’s problematic Anglo-Irish identity, as interrogated by critics from William Butler Yeats to Nicholas Canny. This is well-worn ground in comparison with the terrain mapped out earlier in Lecky’s ambitious, innovative and provocative examination of Spenser’s embeddedness in a culture of Lilliputian resistance to political aggrandisement. Her closing comments appear cagey by contrast:

Without a doubt, Spenser’s text, like van den Keere’s portable maps, helped promulgate the Renaissance state at the expense of those it subjugated. Nonetheless, if imperialism depends upon a single, unitary interpretation of history, then the surest path of resistance against empire is to chart not one hermeneutic road through identity but many. (72)

We may not in the end agree that the colonial poet resisted Empire – even if we buy the planter pastoral versus imperial design opposition – but we can agree on the clarity and precision of Lecky’s poetic prose. This distinctive aphoristic style is obviously the outcome of rigorous editing, and readers may find themselves doing as I did and doubling back to loiter on a specific locution. Yet the brevity goes hand-in-hand with repetition. For example, speaking of the impact of pocket maps on early modern culture Lecky declares:

Grandiose maps created distance; miniature maps engendered intimacy. Large maps displayed sovereign power; little maps granted power to their possessors. Folios mapped romance; twelvemos allowed their owners to romance maps. (37)

This crucial point – that a miniaturist method is inherently open and anti-authoritarian – is at the heart of Lecky’s thesis and is restated in various forms: ‘Whereas large maps were the province of court and estate, pocket maps circulated in a landscape marked by common knowledge’ (40). How common was this knowledge? And how convenient were pocket maps for colonists and soldiers? One intriguing allusion to a late-seventeenth-century sailor called Edward Barlow who sketched coastlines in his journal does conjure up the world of common knowledge that Lecky wants to invoke (40). Yet Barlow was an exceptional figure, and his journal, according to his biographer, is ‘probably the most important first-hand account of seafaring in the seventeenth century’.[18] It certainly invoked the world of colonialism of which Spenser was also a part. And this is another tension within Lecky’s rich study: that her invocation of maps as objects to be found ‘in the libraries of the elite as well as in the pockets of the commons […] as a technology aiding the practice of everyday life’ invites us to consider the administrative, colonial and military dimensions of small-format cartography, an invitation that Lecky herself seems reluctant to take up (47).

Despite Lecky’s elegant argument, it is hard to believe that the late Elizabethan pocket map was as ubiquitous as the London A-Z compiled by Phyllis Pearsall in 1938.[19] Most of the maps Lecky cites have a colonial dimension or are bound up with the very expansionist aims of the Tudor state which she envisages this new format to be challenging. When Lecky cites Thomas Blundeville’s Briefe Description of Vniversall Mappes and Cardes (1589) to note his suggestion that maps were practical and not just for pleasure, the quotation selected refers to ‘the East and West Indies’, and thus reveals the colonial impulse behind this instrumentalist understanding (47). Curiously, Blundeville’s self-deprecatory language as cited by Lecky, in which he intimates that he wrote his pamphlet in a ‘poor Swans nest’, anticipates Imogen’s image of Britain in Cymbeline:

I’th’ world’s volume
Our Britain seems as of it, but not in’t;
In a great pool a swan’s nest. (3.4.136-8)[20]

Notwithstanding Lecky’s assertion, richly referenced in one of her characteristically bountiful footnotes, that ‘Spenser’s cartographic expertise is well-documented’, the worldly Spenser was actually quite miserly in his use of mapping (56). There are only two occurrences of ‘map’ in his works, one borrowed from du Bellay, and one Irish. The map as object or piece of stage business crops up in Spenser’s View at a pivotal point when Irenius is setting out his garrison policy, prompting Eudoxus to enquire: 

I see now all your men bestowed, but what places would you set their garrison that they might rise out most conveniently to service? and though perhaps I am ignorant of the places, yet I will take the Mappe of Ireland, and lay it before me, and make mine eyes (in the meane time) my Schoole-masters, to guide my understanding to judge of your plot.[21]

Lecky does not dwell on this notable mapping moment in the View, or on a map like the Smerwick one that records the naval attack on the fort in 1580 that Spenser must have witnessed, despite the fact that his own account of that siege downplays the extent to which sea-power was crucial to the overthrow of the Spanish and Italian occupants.[22] Nor does Lecky cite Spenser’s use of the map as imperial motif in his translation of Ruines of Rome:

When land and sea ye name, then name ye Rome;
And naming Rome ye land and sea comprize:
For th’auncient Plot of Rome displayèd plaine,
The map of all the wide world doth containe.[23]

If Spenser was sparing in his use of maps and mapmakers, Gabriel Harvey was more expansive. In his attack on Thomas Nashe, as well as invoking ‘the map of their owne imagination’ (118), he namechecks French cartographer Oronce Fine (1494-1555) and Flemish mapmaker Gerardus Mercator (1512-1594): ‘methought his Imagination, was hedded like a Saracen; his stomack bellyed, like the great Globe of Orontius; & his breath, like the blast of Boreas in the great Mapp of Mercator’.[24]

As noted earlier, there is some slippage around the name given by Lecky to the polity (or polities) in which Spenser is located, as we are invited to imagine a dizzying array of political spaces. We first hear it described as ‘early modern Britain’, morphing swiftly into ‘the early modern commonwealth’ (37). What ‘small-scale British landscapes’ can Spenser be deploying to counter ‘the grandeur of the Elizabethan cartographic enterprise’ (38) when, firstly, he died prior to the (re)invention of ‘Britain’, and secondly, when his career as a colonist makes him part of the Elizabethan project of aggrandisement? This is also out of kilter with the subsequent suggestion that ‘The Faerie Queene may be read as a national romance for upwardly mobile London citizens’, and that Spenser was ‘targeting an expansive mercantile readership’ (54). All the evidence would certainly suggest that Spenser was more imperialist than his sovereign. Lecky’s strength lies in her eye for detail and not in larger political claims. This makes Pocket Maps and Public Poetry a joy to read – bright, busy, bustling. When it comes to the bigger picture she is less surefooted, and that may simply illustrate her own point, namely that the real interest resides in the small things. Lecky’s gift as a critic rests in her ability to dig out detail in such a way that her argument has the compressed feel of a footnote. Hers is not a panoramic view but a close-up, and if that means that she is less adept at the broad, generalising sweep then that is a price worth paying for this intellectually exacting and wholly absorbing study.

 

Willy Maley

University of Glasgow



[1] See most recently Tianhu Hao, ‘“Wrap in Shadow’s Light”: Spenser and the Art of the Miniature’, ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, 32.4 (2019), 217-221.

[2] For the earliest use of the word ‘pocketbook’ see William Bathe, Janua Linguarum, Quadrilinguis. Or A messe of tongues: Latine, English, French, and Spanish. Neatly serued vp together, for a wholesome repast, to the worthy curiositie of the studious (London: Richard Field for Matthew Lownes, 1617), where in the epilogue or ‘Advertisement’ the author declares his ‘conceit […] to render the volume as portable as might be, and if not as a Manuall or pocket-booke, yet as a Pectorall or bosome-booke, to be carried twixt jerkin and doublet’.

[3] Lecky repeats this phrase – see e.g. 2 and 50 – which recalls the recent slogan of the British Labour Party, relevant insofar as this is very much a book about mapping the makeup of Britain at a time when we are witnessing the breakup of Britain. See Alia Middleton, ‘“For the Many, Not the Few”: Strategising the Campaign Trail at the 2017 UK General Election’, Parliamentary Affairs, 72.3 (2019), 501-521.

[4] Philip Schwyzer, ‘A Map of Greater Cambria’, in Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein (eds.), Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 35-44, at 37.

[5] Tom Harper, ‘New Acquisition: The Bowes Playing cards of 1590’, https://blogs.bl.uk/magnificentmaps/2014/10/new-acquisition-the-bowes-playing-cards-of-1590.html, accessed 25 December 2019. See Sylvia Mann and David Kingsley, ‘Playing Cards Depicting Maps of the British Isles, and of English and Welsh Counties’, Map Collectors Series 87 (London: Map Collectors’ Circle, 1972), 3-35, esp. 4-5; Sylvia Mann, ‘Geographical Cards by James Moxon’, Journal of the International Playing Card Society, 14.4 (1986), 103-10. 

[6] Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012), 333.

[7] Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life, 334. The author of Robert Bowes’ epitaph played with his name: ‘Whose bodie was the BOWE, and Soule the SHAFT’. See William Fowler, An epitaphe vpon the death of the Right Honorable, M. Robert Bowes Esquire, thesaurer of Barwick: who ended this life, the sixteenth of November, 1597. Being at that present ambassadour for the Queenes Majestie, to the King of Scotland (Edinburgh: Robert Waldegrave, 1597).

[8] See BOWES, Robert I (d.1597), of Aske, Yorks., https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1558-1603/member/bowes-robert-i-1597; BOWES, Sir William (d.1611), of Streatlam, co. Dur., https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1558-1603/member/bowes-sir-william-1611; BOWES, Ralph (d.1623), of Barnes, co. Dur., https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1558-1603/member/bowes-ralph-1623, accessed 25 December 2019.

[9] See W. F. Arbuckle, ‘The “Gowrie Conspiracy”: Part II’, The Scottish Historical Review, 36, 122 (1957), 89-110, at 97-99.

[10] C. A. McGladdery, ‘Bowes, Robert (d. 1597)’, ODNB. Retrieved 5 January 2020.

[11] Maria Unkovskaya, ‘Bowes, Sir Jerome (d. 1616), Diplomat and Glass Maker’, ODNB. Retrieved 15 January 2020.

[12] See Roland M. Smith, ‘Spenser’s Irish River Stories’, PMLA (1935), 1047-1056, esp. 1049-51.

[13] Hadfield, Edmund Spenser, 223.

[14] J. H. Andrews, ‘John Norden’s Maps of Ireland’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 100C, 5 (2000), 159-206.

[15] On Van den Keere see Johannes Keuning, ‘Pieter van den Keere (Petrus Kaerius), 1571-1646 (?)’, Imago Mundi, 15.1 (1960), 66-72.

[16] See Martin Brückner, ‘The Ambulatory Map: Commodity, Mobility, and Visualcy in Eighteenth-century Colonial America’, Winterthur Portfolio, 45.2/3 (2011), 141-160. For Brückner, ‘the meaning of maps in early America was codependent on their commercial mobilization and sensory placement in the colonial material world’ (148).

[17] Michael MacCarthy-Morrogh, The Munster Plantation: English Migration to Southern Ireland, 1583-1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 62.

[18] J. D. Davies, ‘Barlow, Edward (1642-1706?), mariner’, ODNB. Retrieved 14 January 2020. See also Edward Barlow, Meteorological Essays, Concerning the Origin of Springs, Generation of Rain, and Production of Wind: With a Rational and Historical Account of the Causes and Course of the Tide: Its Propagation Thro the Great Ocean: and Its Reception Into the Narrow Seas, and Channels: More Especially Near the Coasts of Great Britain and Ireland: Explicating All Along Its Various Appearances, and Seeming Irregularities: in Two Treatises (London: John Hooke and Thomas Caldecott, 1715).

[19] Pearsall, a mapmaker’s daughter, wheeled her wheelbarrow full of pocket maps – an initial print-run of 10,000 – round England’s capital on the eve of World War Two. Her A-Z Atlas and Guide to London and Suburbs is the first truly universally available pocket map. For this and other map minutiae see Simon Garfield, On The Map: Why the World Looks the Way it Does (London: Profile Books, 2012). See also ‘Pearsall [née Gross], Phyllis Isobel (1906–1996), map publisher’, ODNB. Retrieved 22 January 2020.

[20] Norton 3rd edition.

[21] Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (eds.), Edmund Spenser, A view of the state of Ireland (1633): from the first printed edition (Oxford and Malden, Mass., 1997), 96.

[22] See Tom Glasgow, Jr. and W. Salisbury, ‘Elizabethan Ships Pictured on Smerwick Map, 1580: Background, Authentication and Evaluation’, The Mariners Mirror, 52.2 (1966), 157-165. The map is TNA PRO MPF 75 (SP 64/1): see Hadfield, Edmund Spenser, 479, n.70.

[23] Edmund Spenser, The Ruines of Rome, 26.11-14, in Edmund Spenser’s Poetry, edited by Anne Lake Prescott and Andrew D. Hadfield, 4th ed. (New York: Norton, 2014), 597. All references to Spenser’s poetry are to this edition.

[24] Gabriel Harvey, Pierces Supererogation (London: John Wolfe, 1593), 118, 73.

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Cite as:

Willy Maley, "Katarzyna Lecky, Pocket Maps and Public Poetry in the English Renaissance," Spenser Review (Winter 2020). Accessed April 26th, 2024.
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