Britannia Rules The Waves?: Images of Empire in Elizabethan England
Cormack, Lesley
Early Modern Literary Studies 4.2/ Special Issue 3 (September, 1998)
Abstract
Historians looking for the origins of the English and British empires have long examined theoretical tracts emanating from such moments as the Union of Crowns of 1603. These have yielded much valuable information, but do not give a wider sense of the cultural interest in or proclivity towards these ideas. In order to understand the underlying attitudes towards ideas of empire, we must examine alternative discursive sites, for example, court masques, street processions, and illustrated frontispieces. As historians such as Steven Shapin and Paula Findlen have shown, these cultural analytic spaces often provide a clearer sense of the interplay between intellectual ideas and their cultural and political applications. In this article, I will examine the imperial messages of popular geographical texts, most particularly their illustrated frontispieces, in order to assess these underlying imperial assumptions. While these frontispieces should not be seen as complete in themselves, they demonstrate the widespread interest in and acceptance of these imperial images.
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