Cosmographical Glasses

Geographic Discouse, Gender, and Elizabethan Fiction

Constance C. Relihan

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781612774923
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A fresh perspective on Elizabethan fiction

In Cosmographical Glasses Constance Relihan examines the ways in which sixteenth-century English texts—traveler's reports, ethnographic studies, and geographic guides—provide the foundation for how fictional prose of the period envisions the locations in which its tales are set. Relihan suggests that this nonfictional discourse becomes central to how the fictional prose of the period imagines cultural identity, fictional purpose, and gender identity.

Places and cultures were defined in opposition to each other in early modern romances. In the examples in Cosmographical Glasses, writers attempt to define the spaces of their texts in an effort to identify what it means to be male, English, and Elizabethan.

Through these texts, Relihan considers the various ways in which fictional pieces seize the spirit of ethnographic and geographic texts, as well as the ways in which historically identifiable and overtly fictional places were used to complicate representations of utopian fantasies. A number of prose romances and novella collections and their use of historical and geographical facts are analyzed in order to explore the associations between the genre, the discourses of colonialism, and the construction of gender. These texts become "glasses" that reflect and refract the social and cultural realities of early modern England.

Those interested in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, the history of the novel, and the influence of travel literature on fictional texts will appreciate Cosmographical Glasses.

1

The Fiction of Ethnography/
The Ethnography of Fiction

To be brief, Gentlemen, I have seen the world and rounded it, though not with travel yet with experience.

—Robert Greene, preface to A Notable Discovery of Cozenage (1591)

They which go down to the sea in ships, and occupy the great waters, they see the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep.

—Psalm 107:23–24, qtd. in Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations (1589)

Thomas Blundeville, in the preface to his Brief Description of Universal Maps and Cards (1589) observes that without geography “the necessarie reading of Histories is halfe lame” (sig. A2^v).¹ Yet, supplying that other leg—eliminating that limp—is considerably difficult. As the chapter epigraphs suggest, recovering the texts that contain the material for which Blundeville calls resists easy categorization. In fact, the attempt to identify the early modern discourse of geographic place inevitably leads to what Homi Bhabha refers to as the “slippage of categories” that is inherent in any attempt to create a homogenized national narrative that disregards the complex nature of the lived experience, the “locality” of a culture (140).² The discursive categories that supply the geographic information Blundeville seeks—ethnography, cartography, chorography, history, traveler’s tale—resist identification and separation in the early modern period even as they simultaneously provide a means by which the prose of the period that transgresses the boundaries of these categories is made recognizable as fiction both to sixteenth-century and modern readers. Travel, as Greene and Hakluyt recognized, provides a basis for knowledge—both secular and divine—and for stories of marvels and of the everyday. Moreover, the tradition of such writings, dating back to Strabo and flourishing in the medieval period, combined the factual and the fictional even in ostensibly true narratives, creating texts that both assert and undercut their factual accuracy.

The early modern English ethnographic representation of foreign cultures is, above all, a fictional representation, and detangling the two narrative strands is challenging. “Every story is a travel story,” writes Michel de Certeau; we might reverse that statement: every travel story is a story (115). Even when unacknowledged, the categories of fictional and historical report mesh. Medieval travel discourse had, as Margaret Hodgen reported in her very useful Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, combined “fragments of ancient learning and superstition, disfigured by careless repetition and invention” (34). Her assessment, however, suggests that the authors of early travel literature lacked concern for their texts, that it was carelessness rather than conscious design or a response to cultural imperatives that “disfigured” the texts and distanced them from a more useful ideal. She notes,

Not only were the ancient names of ancient peoples confused but so also were their cultures. Several distinct groups were often lumped together as one. A description of a tribe in Asia was often applied, without explanation or apology, to one in Africa. Further, in the take-over of anthropological tradition from antiquity, the feeling for elapsed time was lost. Medieval scholarship seemed to have no realization that a people described by the ancients one thousand years before might no longer exist. (34)

Stephen Greenblatt is more blunt, acknowledging that for a range of reasons, both conscious and unconscious, early travel writers were “liars” (7), echoing the notion that every travel story is a story. Geographic accuracy and chronology, in other words, were often subordinate to drives toward narrative structure and the powerful use of details, and these drives emerged from the power of generic tradition. The tradition of what John Gillies refers to as “old” geography pushed geographic discourse toward the repetition of received anecdotes and fictional details even as an impulse toward a “new,” observation-based geography emerged.³ Diachronic and synchronic description collapse; observable data and received wisdom occupy the same space in the ethnographic texts of the period. This collapse, as this chapter will show, provides the groundwork for the construction of fictional texts imbued with a geographic sense, which build on geography to create fictional, colonized, gendered alterity.

Fictional Facts and Cosmographical Glasses: Reading Early Modern Geography

William Watreman’s 1555 The Fardle of Facions, a translation of Johann Boemus’s Omnium gentium mores, leges, & ritus ex multis clarissimis rerum scriptoribus (1520), presents one example of the complex ways in which fictional and ostensibly nonfictional representations merge within the period’s ethnographic and geographic discourse.⁴ In addition to being one of the earliest examples of what Gillies identifies both as “a common ethnographic text” and, elsewhere, as a “geographical classic” (93, 149), Boemus’s text was popular, being revised in 1536 and subsequently appearing in twenty-three other editions in its original Latin as well as in French, Italian, English, and Spanish translations (Hodgen 132).⁵

Watreman’s translation begins with Boemus’s preface, which explains the nature of his work:

I haue sought out at times, as laisure hath serued me, Good reader, the maners and facio[n]s[,] the Lawes, Customes and Rites, of all suche peoples, as semed notable, and worthy to be put in remembra[n]ce, together with the situatio[n] [and] descriptio[n] of their habitatio[n]s: which the father of stories Herodotus the Greke, Diodorus, the Siciliane, Berosus, Strabo, Solinus, Trogus Pompeius, Ptolomeus, Plinius, Cornelius the still, Dionysius the Afri[c?]ane, Po[m]ponius Mela, Caesar, Iosephus, and certein of the later writers, as Vincentius, and Aeneas Siluius (whiche aftreward made Pope, had to name Pius the seconde) Anthonie Sabellicus, Ihon Nauclerus, Ambrose Calepine, Nicholas Perotte, in his cornu copiae, and many other famous writers eche one for their parte, as it ware skatered, [and] by piece meale, set further to posteritie. Those I saie haue I sought out, gathered together, and acordyng to the ordre of the storie and tyme, digested into this litle packe. (sig. A.i^r-v)

These two lengthy sentences reveal, it seems, the framework of the text: he has based his descriptions on the works, the “stories,” of others, not on direct observation—on authorities rather than empirical evidence. He has participated in an established humanist tradition, having “shocked … vp together” (sig. A.i^v) what he has culled from his sources; furthermore, he has organized his gleanings “accordyng to the ordre of the storie and tyme” as if compelled by motives that urge accuracy and narrative clarity. Nonetheless, the conclusion of the preface suggests a slightly different authorial plan. There he asserts that he has produced his text because

there is in the knowledge of peoples, [and] of their maners and facions, so greate pleasure and profite, and euery man cannot, yea, fewe men will, go traveile the countries themselues: me thinkes gentill reader, thou oughtest with muche thanke to receyue at my hande these bookes of the maners and facions of peoples most notable and famous, togyther with the places whiche thei enhabite: And with no lesse cherefulnes to embrase theim, then if beyng ledde on my hande from countrey to countrey, I should poynct the at eye, how euery people liueth, and where they haue dwelte, and at this daye doe. (sig. A.ix^v)

In other words, Boemus suggests, classical descriptions of cultures and geography are as accurate in the sixteenth century as they were when Strabo wrote his geography. Were we to visit the locations he describes, with Boemus as our guide, we would see what Strabo and his sources saw: the historical past of his sources and the contemporary experience of his readers merging under the influence of the “old” geography. If that is true, then why not just read Boemus’s sources ourselves? Because, as he goes on to tell us, if we are criticized for reading his work because people think it is “a thyng hath bene written of, many yeares agone, and that by a thousand sondry menne, and yet he but borowyng their woordes, bryngeth it foorthe for a mayden booke, and named it his owne” (sig. A.ix^v), we should respond that Boemus has “not only brought thee other mennes old store, but opened thee also the treasury of myne owne witte and bokes, not euery where to be found, and like a liberall feaster haue set before thee much of myne owne, and many thynges newe” (sig. B.i^r). The work then is a combination of Boemus’s reading and his wit—of material culled from his predecessors and from his own mind and thinking, of received knowledge and “realistic shadings.”⁶ Direct observation, even in this revised statement of his intentions, remains an untapped source of information.

My point here is not only to show that Watreman’s translation of Boemus is partially fictionalized because it relies on traditional sources rather than on direct observation (a reliance also present, as we shall see, in works that claim to be the reports of travelers themselves) but also to demonstrate the interconnectedness of past and present, of textual representation and direct experience, of geographic fact and geographic fiction within early modern culture. Watreman, the “liberall feaster,” takes us on travels with him, imagining ourselves “ledde on [his] hande from countrey to countrey.” We become travelers ourselves, engaged in a fictional, fantasy-laden voyage with Watreman who, as Boemus’s translator, is placed at an additional remove from the geographic and ethnographic material of the text. The various early modern, medieval, and classical reports become more tightly interwoven into a seamless fabric—or a mind-boggling tangle—which has a great impact on the ways in which sixteenth-century England interpreted references to geographical locations in prose narratives with varying claims to historicity. The importance of trying to separate the strands of this tangle is suggested by comments such as those in Richard Willes’s preface to Richard Eden’s History of Travayl (1577). Willes asks, “Of late who taketh not uppon him to discourse of the whole worlde and eche province thereof particulerly[?]” (fol. Ii^r-ii^v).⁷ Moreover, the complicated generic qualities that travel reports embodied were also addressed during the period. Philip Jones’s translation of Albertus Meierus’s Certaine briefe and speciall instructions for gentlemen, merchants, students … marriners, &c. Employed in seruice abrode, or anie way occasioned to conuerse in the kingdomes, and gouernments of forren Princes (1589) emphasizes in its dedication the need for travelers to skill themselves in how to make sense of what they experience during their travels: how, in short, to translate experience into an intelligible narrative so that they will not seem “like the foolish youth, that would needs prove a Latinist without his grammar” but who instead “after his ranginges and peregrinations, shall retire him selfe a man of skill.”⁸ The popularity of such narratives and their factual ambiguity make them of particular importance for early modern prose fiction because of its own varied and tenuous claims to historicity and exemplarity. As factual reports obscure their fictionality, so too do fictional narratives claim factual, historical origins. The generic complexity of such texts creates a complicated reading experience for early modern readers and an even more complicated reading experience for twenty-first-century readers more accustomed to assigning texts to clear discursive categories. The complexity of this reading experience seems aptly echoed in Bhabha’s description of his own attempt to discuss the “locality of culture”:

This locality is more around temporality than about historicity: a form of living that is more complex than “community”; more symbolic than “society”; more connotative than “country”; less patriotic than patrie; more rhetorical than the reason of State; more mythological than ideology; less homogeneous than hegemony; less centred than the citizen; more collective than “the subject”; more psychic than civility; more hybrid in the articulation of cultural differences and identifications than can be represented in any hierarchical or binary structuring of social antagonism. (140)

The complexity of this experience for early modern readers makes it extremely difficult for us to recover, even by analogies that can only hint at the difficulties of interpretation and cultural significance that these texts create. We might think, for example, of the clash between the views of Baghdad held by average U.S. citizens raised before the 1990s and those created by subsequent world events: images of Ali Baba and Scheherazade become intertwined with those of scud missiles. For our children raised with the ubiquity of Disney, the narratives of Aladdin and Jasmine become blended together with reports of the life of women under the Taliban in Afghanistan or under the current Saudi government. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American captivity narratives might also provide an analogy for these experiences. In these texts, the personal experiences of the narrator become intertwined with ethnographic description (again based on both received material and direct observation) of the captor’s culture so that the representation of the culture itself becomes fictionalized.⁹

The intertwining of factual and fictional material within the period’s travel and ethnographic discourse may be well illustrated by Thomas Coryate’s Greetings from the Court of the Great Mogul (1616), which claims to be a letter sent back to England describing Coryate’s adventures and observations while in Asmere in East India. Nonetheless, Coryate informs us that the Mogul “keepeth abundance of wilde beasts, & that of diuers sorts, as Lyons, Elephants. Leopards, Beares, Antlops, Vnicornes; whereof two I haue seene at his Court, the strangest beasts of the world; they were brought hither out of the Countrie of Bengala” (24–25). A woodcut of a unicorn is included, presumably to help concretize his written report (fig. 1).¹⁰

In addition, the title page of the text also includes a woodcut of a man (presumably Coryate) riding an elephant that has distinctly horselike rear legs—the image, in other words, for all its claims to documentary accuracy, simultaneously fictionalizes Coryate’s experience. It domesticates and reduces the Indian elephant to little more than a large, exotic horse, providing a visual image that, as we shall see later in this chapter, participates in the colonialist and didactic motives of early modern ethnography (fig. 2).

Reports of the New World, like those of Coryate and Watreman, are also subject to the distortions of traditional geographical discourse. André Thevet’s Les Singularites de la France Antartique (1557), translated into English in 1568 as The New Found Worlde, or Antarticke,¹¹ claims to be a report of Thevet’s trip to South America. In his “An Admonition to the Reader,” in fact, Thevet claims that his work will describe New World plants and animals “which are cleane contrarie to the setting forth of our Cosmographers and Anciente writers, who for because that they haue not sene the places, and for the smal experience and knowledge that they had, did greatly erre” (unpag.), yet it combines details of his observations with material, as Frank Lestringant has noted, from Vespucci;¹² it also includes material that at least one of Thevet’s contemporaries scornfully dismissed as “completely false.”¹³

Other forms of geographical texts were also subject to this complex intermingling of fact and fiction. William Cuningham’s The Cosmographical Glasse conteinyng the pleasant Principles of Cosmographie, Geographie, Hydrographie, or Nauigation (1559), which describes for travelers such skills as how to determine longitudes and latitudes and how to triangulate distances, explai...