Writing, Geometry and Space in Seventeenth-Century England and America

Circles in the Sand
1. Auflage 2005
ISBN: 978-0-415-32341-3
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 176 Seiten, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 440 g

Reihe: Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture

The early modern map has come to mark the threshold of modernity, cutting through the layered customs of Medieval parochialism with its clean, expansive geometries. Re-thinking the role played by mathematics and cartography in the English seventeenth century, this book argues that the cultural currency of mathematics was as unstable in the period as that of England's controversial enclosures and plantations. Reviewing evidence from a wide range of literary and scientific; courtly and pragmatic texts, Edwards suggests that its unstable currency rendered mathematics necessarily rhetorical: subject to constant re-negotiation. Yet he also finds a powerful flexibility in this weakness. Mathematized texts from masques to maps negotiated a contemporary ambivalence between Calvinist asceticism and humanist engagement. Their authors promoted themselves as artful guides between virtue and profit; the study and the marketplace.

This multi-disciplinary work will be of interest to all disciplines affected by the recent 'spatial turn' in early modern cultural studies, and particularly to students and researchers in literature, history and geography.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate and Professional

Autoren/Hrsg.

Edwards, Jess

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Europäische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Sprachwissenschaften Semiotik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Figures 1. Introduction: Writing, Geometry and Space 2. Discipline and Polish: The Age of Improvement and its Limits 3. Humanist Geometries: Circles in the Sand 4. Discipline Reconsidered: A Perspective to Look Beyond Tradition 5. Ambivalent Geographies 6. Points Mean Prizes: Self-Fashioning and the Mathematical Career 7. The Doubtful Traveller: Mapping and the Middle Man Notes Index

Über Autor(innen)

Jess Edwards is Principal Lecturer in English at Manchester Metropolitan University.