Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes the political ramifications of the new maps than with the broader epistemological implications of the new mathematical precision they embodied. It explores the roots of the English cartographic imagination by arguing that the first development of geographical awareness in England occurred at least half a century earlier than previously thought. The book explains the new types of imaginative manipulation the cartographic imagination made possible by examining the complex world that Edmund Spenser created in The Faerie Queene. It considers how a burgeoning sense of the physical world as a precisely measurable and objective space could bring about a fundamental change in the organizational and metaphoric paradigms available to the imagination. The book discusses the reciprocal influences of a variety of spatial representations, it focuses by exploring the effects of these new ways of imagining space on explicitly non-spatial texts.