Janet Clare

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University of Bristol

Research Fellow Professor Janet Clare is an Honorary Professor of English at the University of Bristol. She is also a Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Studies, University of London, and Emeritus Professor in Renaissance Literature at the University of Hull.

The Circulation of Cosmographical Images: Seeing and Believing

8 Giugno 2022

Sala Convegni - Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature e Culture Moderne

In comparison to the technical sophistication of European woodblock printing, the pictorial culture of early modern England was undeveloped. This is particularly notable in the publications of cosmography, that is of works that variously attempted to explain the relationship between the earth and the heavens or to illustrate the strangeness and the variety of the expanding world. While there is a paucity of printed cosmographical images in England, occasionally it is possible to recognize analogies and transferences in verbal and stage imagery. The epistemological anxieties of cosmography – who or what to belief in the face of old and new knowledge – are reflected on the stage. In this paper, I will explore the correspondence of visual and verbal images in Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographicus Universalis and Shakespeare’s The Tempest. After the Bible Münster’s cosmography was one of the most widely circulated texts in sixteenth century Europe. This compendium of knowledge about the world – what Bodin described as geohistory – taught early modern readers virtually all that they needed to know about the world. The text is lavishly illustrated with maps, world, regional and urban, and images of work, leisure, historic and mythological personages, peoples of recently discovered places as well as strange fauna. Shakespeare’s play introduces us to a world of celestial, mythological and ethnographic images (spirits, monsters, unicorns). Characters hover between belief and unbelief, questioning – like Munster at certain moments – the reliability of the available evidence. At a time when it was beyond the means of all but a few to verify reports on the newly discovered lands, for most the boundary between the credible and the incredible was difficult to discern.