ABSTRACT
In the preface to the 1657 edition of his Cosmographie, Peter Heylyn (1600-62), a theologian and historian of high-church sympathies, remarked that an associate had brushed him aside on a London street with the scorning quip, “Geographie is better than Divinity.” However Heylyn was intended to take this verbal assault, the comment serves to affirm the connections that already existed by the mid-seventeenth century between geographical matters and religious sensibilities. Such associations, in fact, were deep, lasting, and multifaceted and have exerted a considerable impact on the geographical tradition even if the subject’s chroniclers have, by and large, paid scant attention to their historical significance. For analytic convenience, I address these issues on four broad fronts-religious geography, teleological geography, geography and the missionary enterprise, and the geography of religion-even while acknowledging the interplay between components of this categorization and its inadequacy to cover the subject comprehensively.
