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A common kind of revision humanists made to older narratives, regardless of the type of saint being portrayed, was to the geographical and cultural setting. Often they inserted excurses of descriptive geography and historical chronicle not before associated with the given saints. Chapter three investigates how and why humanist authors amended the lives in these novel and sometimes tendentious ways. The chapter associates such chorographical changes with the Germania illustrata project, a wider movement among German humanists to investigate, construct, and glorify an ancient and medieval past that was truly German.

The uncertain relationship between studying regions (or places) and focusing on themes (or systematic processes) has characterised geography since the ancient Greeks, with ‘chorography’ being the term employed to define the art of ‘describing the parts of the Earth’. Geography had been taught in British universities since at least the sixteenth century, when students at the University of Oxford were instructed about maps, globes and discoveries. This chapter examines the manifestation of regional studies in British geography during the twentieth century, paying attention to the institutional structures and some of the individuals involved, as well as the publications that appeared. In particular, the chapter discusses place description, regional geography and area studies.

This chapter examines a possible solution to the problems presented by the first chapter. It shows the importance of chorography for both historiographic and political debate. Following an analysis of various chorographic texts, it demonstrates how the same structures appear in Books III and IV of The Faerie Queene as well as in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe and Prothalamion. It explains that these structures have an unusual capacity for absorbing rival voices. It discusses that through the combination of land and history they gave Spenser freedoms not to be found within the confines of chronicle. It shows that readings of Spenser's river passages expose an alliance between historical and political narratives. It adds that particularly, the poet can be revealed to have used rivers with exceptional subtlety to connect ancient history with current colonial endeavor.

Hadrian's Wall was constructed in the AD 120s and maintained for almost three centuries before ceasing to operate as a Roman frontier during the fifth century. Its scale and complexity means that it is one of the most important ancient monuments in the British Isles and one the most complex and well-preserved frontier works that once defined the boundaries of the Roman empire. In order to address the continuing life of the Wall, this chapter considers the significance of certain places along its line through an approach to its chorography. The aim of this book is to demonstrate that the Wall's Roman identity has been fundamental to its continuing vitality throughout the centuries, including its role and significance in the region, nation, and world today. At the same time, the monument has acquired a range of broader associations as a result of its long and complex sequence of use. It is a composite Wall, but with a Roman identity at the core of its living spirit.

The city portrait, like portraits of human beings, arose in the fifteenth century as a commemorative form combining likeness with symbolism. It came to be associated with a category that the ancient geographer Ptolemy had termed chorography—small-scale terrestrial representation that conveyed outward resemblance along with intangible qualities. Renaissance city portraits like Francesco Rosselli’s “View with a Chain” of Florence or Jacopo de’ Barbari’s view of Venice were simultaneously faithful simulations and creative interpretations of their subjects. To convey their messages, city portraits assumed a range of graphic forms, from maps to pictorial views and ingenious hybrids. While they appeared in a variety of media, the most innovative works were prints that were geared toward the open market. Rome was one of the most frequently represented of all cities, and a place where all the challenges of urban representation crystallized. The Eternal City was a palimpsest of past and present glory, never just a neutral physical reality, and its complicated identity resisted any straightforward visual record.

Chapter 6, we turn to examine Coppo’s Del Sito de Listria, his regional description of his adopted homeland. In this text, we can see the relationship between Coppo’s experience of family and political life in Isola, and his humanist scholarship. His geographical writing and homemade woodcut maps began to reflect his new perspective onto the empire from his study in Isola. Through classical literature, contemporary humanist writing, and most importantly, through his own witnessing of Istrian Roman material culture, Coppo wove an alternative history for Istria than that imposed by the Venetian empire.

Taking its cue from William Sly’s performance of a disoriented playgoer in the Induction to John Marston’s The Malcontent, this chapter puts theatrical performance in dialogue with two other modes of thinking through place in the early modern period: first, what Mary Carruthers has termed the “architectural” model of the arts of memory, and, second, chorography, or the practice of describing a region in terms of its topographical features and history. It argues that these modes resemble one another in depicting place as a kind of phenomenological assemblage, one that comes into being as the disparate features of an ambient environment are perceived and organized within embodied thought. This resemblance reveals the intimate relationship between environment and embodied thought within the early modern English playhouse, and it thereby suggests that theatrical performance was less a form of spatial abstraction than a means of transforming the way that playgoers perceived, experienced, and navigated their surroundings.

This chapter describes the rediscovery of England between the reign of Elizabeth and the end of the seventeenth century which came with new knowledge about the condition and history of England and other countries. The literature of English chorography, travel, and overseas exploration emphasized differences between localities and countries, while new maps illustrated and measured connections between them. The chapter concludes by examining how new information was being used, as early as 1600, to answer questions posed by reason of state about England’s population and economy. Close examination of the present state of England stimulated speculation about its prospects in the future.

The second chapter examines chorography, as defined and adapted by Codazzi and his collaborators. The chapter considers both local conditions and international scientific currents that shaped their geographic practice, which built on and drew legitimacy from the holistic biogeography of Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who emphasized the physiognomy of landscapes and regions. They were also influenced by Adriano Balbi’s quite different method, based on descriptive statistics. An examination of Codazzi’s first chorographic enterprise, the Venezuelan Chorographic Commission, provides insights into the New Granada commission’s unfinished work. The chapter concludes with a discussion of an example of the commission’s early cartography, a chorographic map of the Andean province of Socorro.

Relying on sustained, relentless personification, Drayton’s chorographical epic Poly-Olbion retains the ethical work of The Faerie Queene’s allegory in restoring to the national narrative the embodied immanence of the people within it; but Drayton’s poem takes personification as its dominant representation mode. The poem explores and exploits the paradoxical nature of personification, a device that is simultaneously evocative and anti-mimetic. The case of personification demonstrates the ways description distances itself from its subject, and Poly-Olbion uses its personified topography to interrogate the very possibility of representing space—in cartographic image or topographical text—by troubling the temporal assumptions underlying the cartographic and problematizing the relationship between description and detail. In doing so, the poem generates a mode of descriptive writing reliant on the generative distortion of its subject, ultimately positing an anti-mimetic program—one that lays bare the limitations and fictions of the cartographic—for the representation of space.

This chapter explores national and local geographies, challenging older views of this period as a geographically impoverished caesura between the monumental achievements of the 1662 Atlas Maior and the 1791 First Statistical Account. Instead, it argues, geographical scholarship was very much alive during the Early Enlightenment, but was undergoing rapid and unpredictable change as scholars brought new methodologies and new mentalities to bear on a traditional, humanist discipline. It identifies Sir Robert Sibbald as a key figure in early Enlightenment geographical thought while also recovering the works of the forgotten geographers and antiquaries Alexander Keith and Thomas Orem.

This chapter examines the miscellany’s links with antiquarian compilation and chorography (the branch of geography concerned with the particulars of a specific region or place). Its primary interest is with textual production in the two fields, and with the practices of annotation and organization that allowed antiquaries and chorographers to turn their heterogeneous notes into orderly narratives. The manuscript miscellany, it argues, was essential to the kind of assemblage scholars carried out here. Compilers discussed in the chapter include William Lambarde, Edmund Tilney, George Owen of Henllys, Abraham Ortelius, and most extensively William Camden. The chapter shows that this kind of antiquarian assemblage was most commonly conceived as a kind of stitching or tailoring, in keeping with one of the more frequent early modern metaphors for textual and miscellaneous production.

Conceptions of space and time have conventionally lent themselves to characterizations of late medieval Europe as an ‘Age of Discovery’. These characterizations underpin an account of historical ‘progress’ which is technological, intellectual, and social. Coupled with other retrospective ‘modern’ projections—Renaissance humanism and the rise of ‘the state’—they present a teleological narrative of empirical, rational, and scientific discovery at the waning, even the end, of ‘the Middle Ages’. By qualifying and revising such a narrative, this chapter invites appreciation of a more complex historical reality, a necessarily plural and fragmented picture of socially and culturally conditioned ways of seeing space, measuring time, and understanding the connections between them. The discoveries of the fifteenth century emerge, as a result, not as the reflection of a brave new vision of the world, a shift from ‘religion’ to ‘science’ or from ‘medieval’ to ‘modern’, but rather as a reconfiguration of representations of what was already known. This was certainly an age of conceptual change and development but one which was characterized as much by refining, re-ordering, and reconnection as it was by innovation and discovery.