Chapter 1 explores why the sixteenth century was called “ocularcentric,” that is, how imagery came to be considered an authentic representation of truth. Contemporaries recognized a variety of kinds of imagery, some understood to be realistic representations, others as fabulous. It outlines the burgeoning of printed materials – books, maps, pamphlets – in the very first centuries after Gutenberg, focusing on early modern Europeans’ curiosity about describing their world, not only overseas discoveries but “chorographies” of European lands as well. All of this invited illustration, not always well regulated for accuracy. The chapter concludes by exploring how publishers designed early printed books and visual images.

Chapter 3 engages with literary criticism’s argument that English national imagining became increasingly spatialised under Elizabeth Tudor. Critics argue that cartography and chorography introduced a new spatial awareness into English national consciousness. This criticism, which ignores Scotland, misrecognises as merely ‘national’ the imperial connotations of ‘British’ in the sixteenth century. The chapter shows that sixteenth-century chorographic British antiquarianism is shot through with both nostalgia and imperial ambition: ancient place-names and local legends fill the idea of England with the immanent presence of the British past and the promise of a pan-insular, imperial future. John Dee’s claims for English sea sovereignty over the Arctic and the Americas depended on claims to Scotland. Chapter 2 shows how Spenser’s The Faerie Queene conjures the vision of an Anglo-British imperial island in which Scotland becomes inconceivable. Spenser fuses river poetry, chorography and classical poetry with these texts on naval power, maritime law and English sea-sovereignty to shape the love of Florimell and Marinell as an allegory of Chastity as key to English insular empire.

This chapter explains the nature of Baconian natural history and the philosophy of experiment that came to be associated with it in the late seventeenth century. It also documents the practice of this form of natural history in the early Royal Society and beyond. Baconian or experimental natural history is first set in contrast to classificatory natural history which focused on natural kinds. It was an architectonic program of experiment and fact gathering and fact ordering with a view to discovering the principles of the particular science at hand. Its subject matter ranged from celestial objects to the sea bed, from bodies, states of bodies, and qualities to natural processes. We then discuss the philosophy of experiment associated with this form of natural history as found in the writings of Boyle and Hooke who took inspiration from Bacon. We argue that it is best understood in terms of a typology of experiments, including luciferous and fructiferous experiments and crucial experiments, which were theorised and tried by the first generations of experimental philosophers. Many of the virtuosi in the early Royal Society and those within its ambit practised experimental natural history, and we illustrate this in the work and writings of Christopher Merrett, Thomas Henshaw, William Petty, and Robert Plot. We then discuss the eclipse of Baconian natural history in the wake of the emergence of a new mathematical approach to experimental philosophy that derived from the work of Isaac Newton.

The Chorus in Milton's Samson Agonistes are framed as Milton's friends. In the mold of friendship in this era, they are therefore his peers, his counselors, his advisors, and his allies. They are both companions and neighbours. They also make common cause with Samson in resisting both women, the larger nation of Israel, and especially the Philistines. By showing male friends as creators of a boys-only clubhouse, Milton invokes the local chorographies and regionalism of his day. In making friendship both racist and sexist at its core, Milton also makes his closet drama a tool in exclusive and localized patriarchal networks. Juxtaposed with Thomas Fuller's Worthies of England and Pisgah-Sight of Palestine, Milton's Samson Agonistes is deliberately ungenerous to outsiders or larger loyalties.

The last two decades have seen remarkable developments in our understanding of early modern natural history. Historians have closely scrutinized its research methods, experimental practices, and methodological and epistemological commitments. Building on this recent scholarship, this chapter focuses on a particularly important type of natural history deriving from Francis Bacon, namely, experimental natural history. We show that this new form of natural history provided many branches of natural philosophy with a method for organizing the study of nature—of determining their desiderata, applying experiment, and structuring and exploiting their evidential and observational bases. The most important contributions of experimental natural history to the Scientific Revolution were the elaboration of a new philosophy of experimentation and the introduction of new, practice-based systems of classification.

Considerations of geography and Scottish Romanticism have tended to focus on the function of landscape and setting as vehicles for exploring national and regional identity. This tendency is apparent in many scholarly assessments of post-Enlightenment Scottish literature and culture, but it is especially evident in recent evaluations of the works of Sir Walter Scott. Collectively, these evaluations have enhanced our understanding of Scott’s influence on modern conceptions of Scottish selfhood. Far less attention, however, has been paid to Scott’s personal understanding of geography, and almost no one has considered the relevance of Scott’s writings to latter-day developments in geographical thought and practice. The present chapter takes up these neglected topics, and in doing so it undertakes to examine the relation of Scott’s early poetry and antiquarian research to the emergence of ‘deep mapping’ as a field of performance and inquiry.

Often associated with urban institutions as coffeehouses and learned societies, the Enlightenment included fascination with outsiders – wild men, feral children, shipwrecked solitaries and local savages, or rustics. The long eighteenth-century theatre showcases this interest in “local savagery” in particular through a huge expansion in the number of plays set in spas, villages and country estates. These plays expand the collective vision of the nation, often celebrating the countryside as the green heart of England, the site of immemorial rights and model of social harmony. Just as frequently however, this pastoral image is threatened or subverted by Irish or labouring-class writers such as Robert Dodsley and Oliver Goldsmith, who highlight the local injustice and imperial violence that holds the rural (and national) hierarchy in place. This chapter maps rural dramaturgy from the Restoration forward to reveal these conflicting representational strategies, as Whigs and Tories fought to claim the nation’s heartland as the symbolic ground of political legitimacy and were followed by increasingly radical outliers whose view of rural society was considerably more critical.