Charting an Empire: Geography at the English Universities, 1580-1620.

Lesley B. Cormack, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997. xvi + 281 pp. $68(cl). ISBN: 0-226-11606-9. $23.95(pbk). ISBN: 0-226-11607-7.

A large number of recent books, articles, chapters, conferences, and conference papers have given maps and other geographical texts a surprisingly central place in the interpretation of early modern English culture. National consolidation, overseas exploration, conquest, and settlement, urban and regional development, commercial expansion, agrarian reform, and scientific, religious, and humanist rethinking have all been shown to depend on the new geography of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and geographical interests have been seen to have left their mark on literary and artistic expression of all sorts. Lesley Cormack's Charting an Empire continues this work and gives it a stronger foundation.

Cormack makes two major contentions. First, that "the study of geography was essential to the creation of an ideology of imperialism in early modern England" (1). And second, that the two English universities made a vital contribution to that study. The first of these contentions will come as no surprise to anyone who has been following recent work in this field, but Cormack does much to show precisely how academic study and political ideology were linked. More unexpected is the second contention. Though several studies in the last decade or two have argued that university neglect of natural and mathematically based science has been considerably overstated, no one before Cormack has so thoroughly documented the universities' engagement with geography. Basing her arguments not only on formal curricula and anecdotal evidence of informal practices but also (and especially) on a careful examination of inventories of books owned by Oxford and Cambridge colleges and by individual masters and students and on a no less careful examination of the collective biographies of those book owners and producers, Cormack demonstrates that all three branches of geographical practice - mathematical geography, descriptive geography, and chorography - commanded keen, persistent, and widespread university attention in the crucial forty years from 1580 to 1620 when the English began seriously thinking of theirs as an imperial nation. University men - particularly those associated with Christ Church and New College, Oxford, and Trinity College and St. John's, Cambridge - bought geographical works in large numbers, and many university men, including such notable figures as Richard Hakluyt, William Camden, Richard Carew, William Lambarde, John Dee, Samuel Purchas, Edward Wright, and Thomas Harriot, went on to make substantial contributions both to geographical literature and to England's imperial self-understanding.

The relation to the university of the three branches of geographical study was not, however, quite the same. As Cormack shows, mathematical geography was more narrowly defined as a university subject than the other two, both of which engaged the energies of a much broader community, a community of seamen and travelers in the case of descriptive geography and a community of local antiquaries in the case of chorography. In following the university men who most interest her into these other communities as well as into the environs of London and the royal court - she has informative sections on Gresham College and on the court of Prince Henry- Cormack uncovers the dynamic interchange between the university and the larger world of which it was part. And in providing a full description of the chief concerns addressed by those active in each of the three branches of geography, to each of which she devotes a chapter, Cormack generously widens her focus beyond the universities to give a helpful account of English geographical study wherever it occurred and whatever its ideological entailments.

Thus, despite occasional and perhaps inevitable stretches of tedium as the evidence of book lists and prosopographical research is being put on display, Cormack's study out performs the promise of its title and provides a welcome complement to the close readings of particular geographical texts that have dominated recent work in this area. For anyone who wants to know the who, where, when, and why of early modern English geography, this is a book to read.

RICHARD HELGERSON University of California, Santa Barbara