Drawn for the Mind's Eye: Map Metaphors in Early Modern English Literature

ABSTRACT

Curiosity about imaginary thematic maps described in The Consolidator, Daniel Defoe’s 1705 satirical fantasy about a trip to the Moon, inspired research into the early modern English public's knowledge of maps. The Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Eighteenth Century Books Online (ECCO) databases of digitized early modern literature were employed. A full-text EEBO search of 1600–1700 found the word ‘map’ and its variants in 3382 records. A similar search in ECCO of 1701–1710 yielded results in 1425 records. About half of the results are printed map illustrations and mentions of actual maps, while the remainder are map metaphors in sermons, poems, plays, etc. The metaphors can be classified using Oxford English Dictionary definitions of ‘map’. This literary use of map metaphors arguably prepared the public to accept maps as tools for the visualization of invisible or intangible physical and cultural phenomena, when thematic maps began to develop in the mid-eighteenth century.

KEYWORDS:

• History of cartography
• map metaphors
• early modern English literature
• thematic maps
• Daniel Defoe

Notes on Contributor

Karen Severud Cook has been a Special Collections Librarian in Kenneth Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas since 2001. She was formerly a curator in the British Library Map Library. She was an associate editor of The History of Cartography, vol. 6, The Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and has contributed to volumes 4 and 5 of the series. She directed a National Endowment for the Humanities-funded project to digitize Kenneth Spencer Research Library's collection of books and manuscripts by John Gould, the nineteenth-century English ornithological publisher, and his workshop. Education in art history, geography, and cartography, and work experience as a cartographer inspire and inform her research and publications about the history of cartography. Her main research interests include nineteenth- and early twentieth-century map reproduction and design, especially of geological maps, and early mapping of western and central Australia and of Kansas.