Dr Flynn Allott
Thesis Title: Cartography and the Craft of Seventeenth-Century Prose (Submitted Dec 2024)
Supervisor: Dr Kathryn Murphy
Thesis Abstract: My thesis is an examination of the influence of practical geography and cartography, as taught in the English universities, on seventeenth-century prose. Much previous work on the connection between literary work and cartography has proceeded on terms alien to the language of this teaching, mainly those of ‘space’ and ‘representation’. My introduction instead surveys the language of the Latinate textbooks through which university teachers in geography communicated their art, showing that the inculcation of prudence, mental reformation, and habitual character-formation were the desired effects of learning to read maps. Relating these new emphases to the post-Aristotelian concept of habitus so popular in humanist pedagogy, the introduction closes by showing the geographical habitus’s effect on Jean Bodin and John Milton.
Four chapters examine the influence of this mental and behavioural view of cartography’s virtues on an individual author, each of whom, much criticism has argued, reflect the major currents in prose-style during the century. Francis Bacon’s metaphors of mapping illustrate the shared communicative purpose of cartography and figurative language in theories of education, and this connection is shown to have bearing on Bacon’s ambitions for the reform of learning. Robert Burton’s half- parodic program of curing melancholy contains much praise of mapping’s imaginatively pleasurable varietas, a praise recognisably shaped by the pedagogical background. Thomas Fuller projected a personal style of politically-inflected ‘moderation’ in his maps of the Holy Land, pairing his cartographic style with his rhetorical party-pleasing as a single project. John Aubrey used his scribbled ‘prospect-drawings’ to develop an idiosyncratic, chaotically ‘delightful’ view of antiquarian practice and the mind’s reform. The conclusion reviews the familiar, misleading and oddly similar historiography of prose and geography over the century, arguing that these four authors represent a historical hiatus, where the concerns of ‘science’ and ‘objectivity’ were not cardinal virtues of thought.
I successfully defended my thesis in February 2025. I am also a Lecturer in Early Modern English at St. Peter's College, and an Assistant Editor at Imago Mundi, the leading journal in the international field of the History of Cartography. My research is kindly supported by an Oriel College Graduate Scholarship, and the AHRC's Open-Oxford-Cambridge Doctoral Training Partnership. From May-August 2025, I will be a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin.
Publications:
‘The Fate of Philologus: Learning and Prattle in Seventeenth-Century Religious Dialogue’, The Seventeenth Century (early access, 2024). Available online at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0268117X.2024.2427707#abstract.
‘Renaissance habitus: Three Books on Pedagogy and Literature’, Extended Review Essay on Katrin Ettenhuber, The Logical Renaissance; Kathy Eden, Rhetorical Renaissance; Katherine Little, Humanism and Good Books in Sixteenth-Century England, COMITATUS 55 (2024): pp. 247-62.
'Material Metaphors for Literary Form: Robert Burton's "Perused" Copy of Theatrum Urbium Italicarum (1599)', Renaissance Studies (2022). Available online at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/rest.12847.
