Geography as the Eye of History

Abstract

The overlap between history and geography was a common mode in the early modern imagination of space and it opens up a narrative about the scientific and fictional representation of a world that had become much larger and much better described in the late sixteenth and early- seventeenth centuries than ever in the recorded past. Conceiving of geography as ‘the eye of history’ as Ortelius wrote in the Parergon’s title page,¹ and as necessary for the true understanding of history the cartographer makes claims regarding the visual character and scientific accuracy of maps as essential for the proper understanding of past events.² This chapter seeks to respond to a series of questions related to the geographic and cartographic representations of European space in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England and how they influenced new perceptions of the known world, which also had repercussions in drama. How have geography, maps, and mapping served to order and represent physical, social, and imaginative worlds? How has the practice of geographic description and mapping shaped early modern seeing and knowing? In what ways did early modern contemporary changes in people’s experience of the world alter the meanings and practice of geography, and vice versa? In their diverse expressions, geographic narratives and the representational processes of mapping have constructed the spaces of modernity since the early Renaissance.