awaits us all.
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
1 Brotton, Jerry. The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
2 Burckhardt, Jacob. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Vol. 2. Trans. S. C. G. Middlemore. Introduction, Benjamin Nelson and Charles Trinkaus. New York: Harper, 1958.
3 Dimmock, Matthew. New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate Press, 2005.
4 Erickson, Peter and Kin F. Hall. “‘A New Scholarly Song’: Rereading Early Modern Race,” Shakespeare Quarterly 67/1 (2016): 14–29.
5 Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic; Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.
6 Hakluyt, Richard. The Principal Nauigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoueries of the English Nation, 2nd ed. London,1598–1600.
7 Heng, Geraldine. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
8 Jardine, Lisa. Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996.
9 Kamps, Ivo and Jyotsna G. Singh, Eds. Travel Knowledge: European “Discoveries” in the Early Modern Period. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
10 Loomba, Ania. “Periodization, Race, and Global Contact,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37/3 (2007): 595–620.
11 Loomba, Ania, Ed. “Introduction,” in A Cultural History of Western Empires in the Renaissance (1450–1650). London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019, 1–26.
12 Matar, Nabil. Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
13 Parker, Patricia. “Cassio, Cash, and the Infidel ‘O’: Arithmetic, Double-Entry Book-keeping, and Othello’s Unfaithful Accounts,” in A Companion to the Global Renaissance: English Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion, 1st ed. Ed. Jyotsna G. Singh. Wiley, Blackwell, 2013, 223–241.
14 Smith, Ian. Race and Rhetoric in Renaissance England: Barbarian Errors. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
15 Vitkus, Daniel. Turning Turk: English Theatre and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630. New York: Palgrave, 2003.
Introduction The Global Renaissance
Jyotsna G. Singh
I Globes
Queen Elizabeth claims the world in the allegorical Armada portrait shown in Figure 0.1. Her right hand rests on a globe, her fingers “covering the Americas, indicating England’s dominion of the seas and plans for imperialist expansion of the New World.”1 Dated c. 1588, this painting commemorates the defeat of the Armada, part of an “outpouring of the eulogistic material” that marked this event, but the date of the portrait has also been anecdotally linked to the birth of the first English child in the Virginia colony.2 The viewer’s gaze is particularly drawn to the terrestrial globe under her hand – seemingly innocuous in terms of its dimensions – but a familiar object of the period, represented in print and paintings, that functioned as a “socially affective object” signaling a “transitional moment in the history of modernity” (Brotton 1999, 72). History and geography intersect in the allegorical image of the globe, marking recognizable territorial boundaries of the new world, while observing a triumphal moment in Elizabeth’s reign in which England defeats Spain, a Catholic power and its rival, with one instance of its rivalry being the colonization of the Americas. Here, it is apparent that placed in the luxurious setting of this painting, the globe would appeal to the emotions and imagination of the viewers while signaling the development of an emergent geography in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Showing the ways in which the terrestrial globe figured in promoting “an affective global awareness,” Brotton explains its history as follows:
Figure 0.1 Elizabeth I, Armada Portrait, attributed to George Gower, c. 1588. Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire. The Bridgeman Art Library. Source: Digital Image Library/Alamy Stock Photo
By the end of the first decade of the sixteenth century, geographers and diplomats began to question the effectiveness of the flat, rectangular map for encompassing the growing dimensions of the terrestrial world. In 1512 the Nuremburg scholar Johannes Cochlaeus reflected a sense that classical geographical perceptions were no longer adequate in describing and representing the proliferation and expansion of newly discovered territories … [One] response of a range of geographers and cosmographers was to intensify their interest in projecting the earth’s surface on a sphere, rather than on a plane surface.
(1999, 78)
Another telling instance of the symbolic and affective power of the terrestrial globe is narrated by Matthew Dimmock, evoking “a broadening of access of worldly materials ... and a new sense of England and its queen as a global actor” (8). He begins his recent illuminating study, Elizabethan Globalism (2019), with a description of an episode involving Queen Elizabeth I and framing it with a question: “What was an English vision of the wider world at this point [at the end of the sixteenth century]?” (3).
In late 1592 the merchant and financier William Sanderson had formally presented the queen with the first English-made terrestrial globe … for Elizabeth and her subjects … this new globe was an encompassing of new geographical knowledge, a tool for facilitating action, a national triumph, a profoundly “affective object”...
(3–4)
Viewing this moment as having an uncanny symbolic significance, as representative of an emergent “Elizabethan globalism” (4), he elaborates on its specific associations with the new mercantile forces and Elizabethan explorers:
The new globe was a product of English voyages of trade and exploration, most prominently the famous circumnavigations of Francis Drake (1577–1580) and Thomas Cavendish (1586–1588), whose routes are carefully traced across its surface in red and blue … and valorized the flourishing of English global enterprise …
(4)
Interestingly, however, these terrestrial globes not only figured in the development of global geography in early modern England and Europe but also were also ideologically deployed by rulers in drawing their claims to territorial possessions in newly discovered, distant territories, and generally invested with geographical and political power by men of authority and knowledge at the time.3 Not surprisingly, then, images of terrestrial globes proliferate in Renaissance cultural artifacts, as symbols and markers of a new global consciousness, evident in Holbein’s famous portrait of the Ambassadors, which depicts French claims to Brazil; on the crest of Francis Drake’s coat of arms on which a sailing ship sits atop a globe; in Queen Elizabeth’s Armada portrait mentioned earlier; and in the Ditchley portrait by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger that depicts the queen standing on a map of England on a globe, among numerous others. A preoccupation with the image of the globe vividly evokes an awareness of an expanding world, which Europeans began to recognize through their experiences of travel, exploration, discovery, commerce, and competitive conquest and colonization of new lands.
As the terrestrial globes symbolized growing territorial power, they were also reminders that European nations – despite their bitter religious and political schisms and rivalries – shared a proximity of history and geography, even as they were often rivals in commerce and conquest. But did they realize that some powerful, non-European, Islamic rulers, for instance, also claimed the globe on their own terms – in which Europeans were often inconsequential and insignificant? Not only in Europe and England, as in Elizabeth’s