Richard Norwood is known today mainly as the first cartographer of Bermuda. The famous shipwreck of 1609, recounted in William Strachey’s narrative (a part of the Bermuda sources of Shakespeare’s The Tempest), produced conditions of social egalitarianism without any claims of private property so that the “common people” did not want to leave Bermuda for Virginia. When their demands were quashed and a year later Bermuda was officially colonized, Norwood (also a Puritan) became the surveyor of this Edenic island, imposing private property relations on it for potential investors. Showing the formation of his growing individualist self-consciousness, Bartolovich makes a clear connection between capitalism and individualism as she shows us how “Norwood’s Bermuda writings … [are] entirely suppressing the early Edenic period,” which implies that “the compensation for giving up Eden and commonality was individualism, improvement, and ‘order.’” To sum up, as a Puritan as well as a surveyor, Norwood marks a site in which religious self-consciousness and technological “improvement” worked together to produce the “individual” that is now often, paradoxically, taken for granted as the fundamental unit of “modern” society.
John Michael Archer engages with globalism via an analysis of map-making, representation, and Islam in the Renaissance world-picture as contexts for Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays in his essay, “Islam and Tamburlaine’s World-Picture” (Chapter 3). Approaching Marlowe’s play as an epic on a global scale, this essay examines Marlowe’s “world-picture” – as Heidegger defines it: “not a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as a picture.” Archer begins with a consideration of how contemporary map-making projects influence the play’s epic sweep of geographical locations; second, he questions the extent to which Islam was represented within “the human geography of the world pictured on the early modern stage.” Muslim strictures on the image and the Qur’an’s cosmography figure in the play, though representations of Islam remain distorted. But we are nonetheless reminded that representation itself was at stake in the relations between Islam and Christianity in the early modern global world (as it is today).
Marlowe’s play is very much preoccupied with mapping the globe and problems of representation; with medieval and Ptolemaic maps, terrestrial globes, and Ortelius’ orbicular, round, three-dimensional volume on a flat surface. Both the medieval and Ptolemaic maps cancel each other out in Tamburlaine’s initial dreams of conquest, and, by the end of Part II, even when a world map quite similar to that of Ortelius appears on stage, Tamburlaine can only enumerate “unconquered regions,” accepting the failure of his global imagination of conquest. Archer’s larger point here is to show that while the Qur’an (or Alcoran) and the world map both appear on stage, the authority of both “image-objects” is flaunted and then forgotten, as Tamburlaine burns the Qur’an. Ultimately, not only Islam itself but also religion in general “produces an effect antagonistic to representation.” Archer’s claims serve as a reminder of intractable religious divisions even in the face of cross-cultural exchanges.
As we have seen in the case of Spenser’s epic poem, Norwood’s biography, Marlowe’s play, and in maps and terrestrial globes, the English (and the Europeans) responded to the global currents by producing cultural forms for mapping, interpreting, and imaginatively and cognitively grappling with this changing world. Chloë Houston further explores this engagement via the genre of utopian literature, rooted in classical and Christian modes of thinking about an ideal way of life but popularized following the invention of the word “utopia,” and the revival of the utopian mode by Thomas More’s Utopia of 1516. Titled “Traveling Nowhere: Global Utopias in the Early Modern Period” (Chapter 4), Houston’s essay approaches utopias in a global context, demonstrating how they constitute a discourse preoccupied with physical and imaginative experiences of travel beyond European borders and imagining new societies where people may live better lives. Utopian literature, Houston argues, is closely aligned to travel writing and since both forms are concerned with “journeys, discovery … cultural exchange, and the development of networks, and with the recording of these phenomena, [they] have something to do with this process of globalization and can be understood as both producing and productive of a ‘global Renaissance.’”
First examining Lucian’s Vera Historia as a classical source for the satiric and ironic aspects of early modern utopianism, Houston draws on three texts for her analysis of the status of utopias: Thomas More’s Utopia set somewhere in the Americas; Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis in the Pacific; and Johann Valentine Andreae’s Christianopolis in an unknown “Academic” ocean. While the latter two seem to describe somewhat ideal societies, all three were simultaneously enthusiastic about useful possibilities of travel yet also implied that the ideal society must be kept separate from the rest of the world. Thus, the Renaissance utopia’s concern with borders and boundaries reflects and even prefigures an interaction with “contemporary processes of globalization,” in which the discovery of new lands by English (and European) travelers would become “spaces in which territorial claims would be contested and borders and boundaries redrawn and reestablished.”
The final essay in Part I, by Stuart M. McManus, “Understanding Slavery in Early Modern Asia: Jesuit Scholarship from Seventeenth-Century Iberia and Asia” (Chapter 5), explores how the Iberian world participated in and contributed to the era of expansion and specifically how its culture changed through interactions with other peoples in Asia. Here we witness the emergence and growth of a distinctive world system of the period: the European slave trade, revealing both its inhumane practices and moral justifications. In this chapter McManus argues that the work of Iberian Jesuit scholars in both Asia and Europe created what amounted to an international and comparative law related to slavery that aimed to understand and regulate the global trade in human beings by Iberians and others in the early modern period. Here, the focus is on Luis de Molina’s brief but highly suggestive treatment of Asian slavery in De iustitia et iure, which is usually hastily passed over in order to highlight his discussion of the transatlantic slave trade, as well as its development in Gomes Vaz’s De mancipiis Indicis. In this way, this chapter contributes to the ongoing project of building up a connected and comparative picture of slavery in the early modern world that reveals its multiethnic and interconnected nature in an era of global expansion. In conjunction with Chapter 17, this study of Iberian ideas about slavery demonstrates how the slave trade was intrinsic to the capital flows and the exploitation of labor underpinning the European and English economies at the time.
“Contact Zones”
In considering the Renaissance in “global” terms and understanding how England and its European competitors developed a geographical imagination, it is also useful to examine the historical spaces of “contact zones” as a way of invoking what Mary Louise Pratt defines as “the spatial and temporal co-presence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, and whose trajectories now intersect” (7). Pratt focuses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European travelers in Africa and South America, viewing their interactions with the “natives” of these lands in terms of “colonial encounters,” but nonetheless wishes to “foreground the interactive, improvisational dimensions of [these] encounters so easily ignored or suppressed by … accounts of conquest and domination” (7). The European exploration and trading activities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were not yet a part of a full-fledged colonial global economy that Pratt locates in the eighteenth century, but these early “colonial encounters” nonetheless offer a complex and nuanced perspective on growing expansionist drives exhibited by several nations, as evident in the ten essays in Part II, which examine a range of travel writings, including visual images and cartographic materials. Mapping different “contact zones” in a wide range of geographical locations, these essays involve many different actors: merchants, factors, artists, mariners, ambassadors, religious missionaries captives, soldiers, and free agents, and wives, seeking wealth, fame, and other