Ruling the World: The Cartographic Gaze in Elizabethan Accounts of the New World
Koch, Mark
Early Modern Literary Studies 4.2/ Special Issue 3 (September, 1998)
Abstract
The increasingly accurate and representational map-making of the sixteenth century used two techniques in its surveyance of the land which provided a privileged view of the world as seen from above. These techniques, the bird’s eye view (as seen in the maps of Braun and Hogenberg) and the grid of longitude and latitude (rediscovered in Ptolemaic geography), are found not only in visual images of land, but also in a number of the written accounts of New World voyages that appeared in Richard Hakluyt’s “Principal Navigations . . . of the English Nation” (1589). As with the maps, these chorographical accounts of prospective colonies inscribed a gaze of territorial authority that allowed the English to conceive of colonial space not only by situating it, but by making it familiar, making it known.
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