Ranging widely across the visual and textual artifacts of mapping, from the literature of Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe and Jonson, to representations of body, city, nation and empire, this book argues for a reevaluation of the impact of cartography on the shaping of social and political identities in early modern Britain.

List of illustrations; Preface; Notes on contributors; Introduction Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein; Part I. Contested Spaces: 1. Absorption and representation: mapping England in the early modern House of Commons Oliver Arnold; 2. A map of Greater Cambria Philip Schwyzer; 3. Britannia rules the waves?: images of Empire in Elizabethan England Lesley B. Cormack; 4. Performing London: the map and the city in ceremony Andrew Gordon; 5. Visible bodies: cartography and anatomy Caterina Albano; Part II. Literature and Landscape: 6. The scene of cartography in King Lear John Gillies; 7. Unlawful presences: the politics of military space and the problem of women in Tamburlaine Nina Taunton; 8. Marginal waters: Pericles and the idea of jurisdiction Bradin Cormack; 9. 'On the famous voyage': Ben Jonson and civic space Andrew McRae; 10. Imaginary journeys: Spenser, Drayton, and the poetics of national space Bernhard Klein; 11. Do real knights need maps? Charting moral, geographical and representational uncertainty in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene Joanne Woolway Grenfell; Epilogue: 12. The folly of maps and modernity Richard Helgerson; Select bibliography.