Rhonda Lemke Sanford. Maps and Memory in Early Modern England: a Sense of Place.

(Early Modern Cultural Studies, 1500-1700.) Houndmills and New York: Palgrave/St. Martin's Press, 2002. xiv + 225 pp. index, illus, bibl. $55. ISBN: 0-312-29455-7.

The metaphor industry is alive and well, to judge from the best parts of Maps and Memory in Early Modern England, although whether the Series Editor's goal of "transculturation and globalisation" (xii) is as healthy is debatable. The intended interdisciplinarity is stated in the foreword--this is a "study of how the English tried to locate themselves and their nation through the creation of both maps and literary representations of geographical space" in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries--but it has to be said right away that the literary representation wins hands down. The author is at home here and most successful in writing on the marriage of the eminently mappable Thames and the Medway (from Spenser's Faerie Queene); on feminine geography and figurative maps (Queen Elizabeth I as Europa and Virginia); on attitudes of the new gentry to their country houses and estates as reflected in poetry (Ben Jonson's "To Penhurst"); and on perceptions of the city as expressed by Isabella Whitney in a "Wyll and Testament," in which she "leaves" parts of London to various people. In the main parts of these four chapters, the literary works are teased apart to reveal the ground beneath. Both viewpoint and view shift from the distant, and the small-scale map showing whole countries or continents, to the factotum's intimacy with the agricultural idiosyncrasies of his master's estate and to the individual streets of London along which the queen moved in her London "Progress," trailing pageants in her wake. Geography here is no mere backcloth, but a dynamic factor in the creation of literature. It is a bumpy ride over the ground covered, however, and between these vignettes the reader is liable to be distracted, if not irritated. For a start, the juxtaposition of five essays and a brief epilogue does not of itself make a book, and the text is punctured by the sort of self-conscious and repetitious signposting usually associated with a university thesis. No less distracting is the prominence given to the analysis of recent studies of the work in question, or on a similar theme, as if the author is engaged in a private debate with her colleagues in the field rather than striding confidently ahead hand in hand with the reader.

How do the maps fit in? Clumsily, it has to be said. Irrespective of the historical nature of the overall objective and the individual themes, this is not a historical study. The chronology can be disconcerting--1616, 1995, 1523, 1607, back to 1616 and then to 1995 again, all in a couple of pages (90-91). The author is much less at ease with her cartographical than her literary reading, and the maps are unconvincingly grounded. The review of the history of maps which constitutes the opening chapter--and which reads as if pasted in to justify the book's title--serves neither as a reliable summary of the relevant aspects of map history nor as an introduction to the book as whole. It is sad to be still reading in the twenty-first century of the "great deal of ... decorative detail" on mappamundi, and that "Ancient Christians placed Jerusalem at the center of their maps" (4-5). Confidence is not entirely restored when material from this chapter reappears later in the book, some times more than once and again misleadingly. For example, John Norden's project was precisely to produce a textual county-by-county chorographical description of England, paralleling William Camden's but including maps. Thus Norden's map of Middlesex (1593) accompanies his text, not vice versa (107), and it is hardly surprising that the map is small (20 x 25 cms.) since it is an illustration in a small book. To suggest that this indicates that the map was "meant for everyday use rather than display" is an odd way of putting it. Who were the readers, either of the maps or the literary works, is an important question that is never raised.

All in all, this is a tantalizing publication. It was clearly not conceived as a single whole and its disjointedness detracts. Its failure to meet the challenge of writing "transculturally" can be ascribed to the lack of a sustained argument and to the way the source material is described rather than integrated. Yet there is much to recommend in it, not least for the way it entices readers to pause over the unfamiliar facets of their usual literary or cartographical preoccupations.

CATHERINE DELANO-SMITH

Institute of Historical Research, London