Maps and the Writing of Space in Early Modern England and Ireland. (Reviews).

Bernhard Klein. Maps and the Writing of Space in Early Modern England and Ireland

New York and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001. xii + 235 pp. + 16 pls. $65. ISBN: 0-333-77933-9.

Bernhard Klein opens his study of English maps and map consciousness (81) by outlining three conceptual, but not sequential, stages by which the map-maker transforms the attributes of land into the flat surfaces of a map. Space is first measured, then, visualized, and finally, narrated. Measuring is the province of the surveyor who physically enters the landscape. Visualization is the purview of the cartographer who, confined to a study, produces cartographic images that represent particular social, political or economic spaces (3). Narration, while, ostensibly the domain of the chorographer, the travel writer, and the poet, transcends any particular vocation, since any maker or reader of maps understands that cartographic, like all other, images are liable to appropriation by any number of narrative frameworks or ideologies. Klein synthesizes the prodigious secondary literature on English maps, surveying, chorography, and nation-building to flesh out these stages. If his book is not theoretically innovative, it nonetheless does a good job of focusing the theoretical insights of others onto the scene of English map culture. Klein is at his best when engaged in close readings of maps and texts. And his examination of English cartographic representations of Ireland yields a visual understanding of the contradictory character of English representations of Ireland: Ireland requires English domination because it is different and barbarous, yet Ireland deserves incorporation into the British nation state given its geographical affinity with England and its susceptibility to English reform.

The book divides into three sections: one on measuring, the second on cartographic imagery, and the third on geographical narrative. Part one, chapter one concentrates on the extent to which the geometrical geography of Ortelius and Mercator transformed European map-making from the depiction of land imbued with social relations and regional particularities to the representation of land as abstract, geometrical space. Chapter two explores the estate map from the divergent perspectives of landlords and tenants. Tenants remained suspicious of surveyors, while landlords embraced estate maps that provided for the legal, economic, and technological needs of estate management and could be used as symbols of social power and status. Chapter three considers, on the one hand, how surveying was conceived as a tool of English domination in Ireland. On the other, it discusses the extent to which the unsettled, unknown, and rebellious condition of Ireland's native inhabitants resisted the surveyor. Part two focuses on how the cartographic images of Saxton, George Lily, Speed, Laurence Nowell, and Richard Bartlett helped construct the idea of England as a nation in contradistinction to Ireland, which was varyingly represented as a colony or an extension of the British nation state. Part three focuses on the conflicts that emerge between the chorographical descriptions of Camden and Harrison, as well as the epic poetry of Spenser and Drayton.

For Klein, early modern English maps and spatial narratives must be read in terms of two competing ideologies: the developing ideology of geometric rationalization that makes land more serviceable to the interests of political hierarchy and economic commodification, and a traditional ideology of the socio-historical character of place that envisions land as a local affair, made up of the multiple layers of social interactions, provincial customs, and community relations. Awareness of both the globalizing credo of rationalization and the localizing tenets of custom and community support Klein's readings of national and county maps, as well as surveying manuals. Klein uses a related dyad -- the opposition between map and itinerary -- to discern the geographical imaginations of Spenser and Drayton and to anatomize the workings of English chorographic description of Ireland. Klein argues that Spenser's Faerie Queene evinces an ethical distrust of the map; for Spenser, the map is but another idol that the hero mus t reject in order to pursue an ethical itinerary of his or her own. In contrast, Drayton's Poly-Oblion employs a mythopoetic map consciousness that aims to represent the English national essence (157). Intriguingly, Spenser's View of the Present State of Ireland employs both map and itinerary, first zooming in to the level of itinerary when describing the savagery and ineptitude of the Irish people, then enlarging the focus when depicting the equanimity of Ireland's topography.

In sum, except where the author unnecessarily belabors the point that maps inscribe social meanings, this book offers a fine account of the current state of English cartographic and chorographic studies as well as useful close readings of maps, map consciousness, and the early modern poetics of space.