Jerry Brotton

St George between East and West

The connection between St George and Englishness is firmly rooted in most discussions of the iconography of nationalism. It stretches from Shakespeare through to the recent revival of the red-cross flag as the defining symbol of England in the wake of political devolution in Scotland and Wales. The history of the saint’s migration from eastern Christian and Ethiopian traditions in late Antiquity into England during the Crusades and development into a national patron saint has attracted much broad historical discussion.1 But relatively little critical attention has considered the ways in which this cultural transmission mediated specific tensions between Christian European and Islamic cultures to the east of Europe during one of their most competitive periods of artistic and intellectual engagement, from the late fifteenth century onwards. This is partly because cultural historians and literary scholars have only recently started to consider such cultural exchanges as meaningful to the wider development of the European Renaissance.2 I want to suggest that this renewed sensitivity to the ways in which icons and images circulated between Christian Europe and the predominantly Islamic communities to its east offers a different perspective on the ways in which St George signified to various communities, both Christian and Muslim, and that the nationalist perspective is just one, somewhat anachronistic dimension of the saint’s significance which tends to limit our understanding of the way such figures looked eastwards and westwards in the global early modern world.

A ‘Devious Course’: Projecting Toleration on Mercator’s ‘Map of the World’, 1569

Abstract Mercators map projection (1569) has often been regarded as a scientifically disinterested innovation in projecting the globe onto a plane surface. This paper argues that by resituating Mercators career within the theological conflicts of the European Reformation, it is possible to identify a more moralised, stoic inspiration for the projections creation. In particular, Mercators preceding work on theology and chronology disclose other ways of interpreting the projection. The rhumb line is taken as a defining element of Mercators theological geography.

Re-visioning the World: Mapping the Lithosphere

Our planet is now a human artifact in many significant ways. In what follows we offer a genealogy of ‘terra-forming’, culminating in a discussion of a proposed installation that will offer a critical and artistic reflection on the Anthropocene moment. ‘Terra-Forming’, the construction of a relief map of the surface of the globe without water, is our attempt to address the aesthetic dimension of geological time-marking, dissolving distinctions between art and science. This is a visceral and poetic proposal, aiming at sublime response in which reactions ‘well up’ to physically and emotionally reshape perceptions of the world. As water slowly covers our alabaster map, in a simulation of the great flood, it will hopefully suggest many applications and provoke a surge of conversations and ideas.

London: The Selden Map and the Making of a Global City, 1549‒1689

Controversy in reasonable detail and how its resolution negatively impacted the Jesuit mission, he does not dwell on how that success turned the Jesuits at Court more into modern bureaucrats than ‘savers of souls’ and at the same time created jealousy and political backlash that made the Jesuit position tenuous. Qi explains the strong relationship that was developed by Verbiest with the young emperor Kiang Xi, while teaching him mathematics and astronomy. Qi details how this on-going association developed and lead to the project to scientifically survey Kiang Xi’s domain and produce the maps. A key element of this effort was defining a standard length for the Chinese measurement of distance li, analogous to the kilometre. This is an intriguing story and more detail would have been useful. This manuscript atlas was first presented to Kiang Xi in 1718 by the French Jesuit Pierre Jartoux. As Cams tells us, not long after that ‘Jartoux managed—perhaps secretly— to send a complete atlas’ along with some notes and a translation of place-names to Jean-Baptiste du Halde in Paris. But it was not until 1737 that d’Anville was able to publish the maps. Cams explains quite reasonably that the delay was caused by the fear that if the maps were published in France, they would get back to China and create problems for the Jesuit mission. As with many maps, their ‘life’ can be quite interesting, and Cams does an admirable job of leading us through the intrigue of pirated editions in the Netherlands. In fact, it is from one of these unauthorized printings that maps in this book are taken. There is always a balance to strike in providing essays in a book like this. On the one hand, the contributors feel they should restrict themselves to simply the facts and new information related to atlas itself, rather than duplicate or re-hash what has been covered, probably in more depth, in the scholarly literature. On the other hand, using the book to survey the current state of our understanding of the Jesuit mission up to the point of this major cartographic accomplishment would have immensely benefit the expert and non-expert alike.

Shakespeare's Turks and the spectre of ambivalence in the History Plays

Critical interest in Shakespeares depiction of race and ethnicity has usually been confined to exploring his Moorish characters, contextualised by historical accounts of Anglo-Islamic relations focused on Morocco. This paper offers a different approach based on the fashion for Turk plays which defined the Elizabethan playhouses in the 1590s. It asks why Shakespeare did not put a Turk on his stage, and explores instead the ghostly presence of this figure in his History Plays. Starting with the reference to Mohammad in Henry VI Part 1, it examines the recurring motif of the Turk as it appears throughout the Henriad, culminating in the ambivalent depiction of Henry V as simultaneously a virtuous Christian prince and scheming, Machiavellian tyrant who threatens to ‘turn Turk’. Tracing the spectre of the Turk back through a range of humanist and Reformation texts including those by Erasmus, this article argues that Shakespeare draws on the ambivalent spectre of the Turk as a particularly satisfying and enjoyable theatrical fantasy, which throws new light on Othello.

The Spanish acquisition of King Charles I's art collection The letters of Alonso de Cárdenas, 1649–51

The letters of Alonso de Cardenas, the Spanish diplomatic representative in London from the 1630s to the 1650s, offer an unrivalled account of the everyday activities involved in the Commonwealth sale of King Charles Is art collection from 1649 to Cardenass diplomatic expulsion from England in 1655. Previously published in the original Spanish, this article provides the first complete English translation of Cardenass letters during this period. It also offers an account of Cardenass dealings with the republican authorities and private dealers and situates the Spanish diplomat as central to the development of an English art market under the Commonwealth.

Book Review: Maps and politics, Maps and history: constructing images of the past

Armand Mattelart with reference to the concept of the ‘network’, and by James Corner with reference to the ideas of (among others) Buckminster Fuller and Raoul Bunschoten. The history of vision is a major theme in Lucia Nuti’s study of Renaissance chorography, as it is in Wystan Curnow’s essay on the relation between maps and art (including photographs, ‘installations’ and performance art) since what he describes as the ‘spatial turn’ of the late 1960s. As might have been expected, most of the contributors both use and discuss social and cultural theory. There are references to communication theories, from Norbert Wiener to Roland Barthes and Marshall McLuhan. There are frequent but brief and somewhat tantalizing references to the psychology of mapping, from Freud and Winnicott to Lacan, with a somewhat more sustained discussion of Deleuze. However, the principal theoretical presence in the volume (despite his absence from the index) is surely Foucault, notably in the chapters by Christian Jacob, Michael Charlesworth (on the eighteenthcentury chorography of Kent) and David Matless (on ‘power-knowledge’ in midtwentieth-century Britain). Despite this diversity of theoretical inspiration, Mappings is a coherent volume which achieves its editor’s aim of taking the discussion of the opacity and transparency of maps a stage further and presents its conclusions in a manner accessible to students as well as their teachers in a number of disciplines. The essays by Jacob and Carter in particular are likely to be cited and discussed a great deal in the years to come.