Chapter 5 turns to Milton’s exploration of custom as it informs Britain’s ancient territories of civic liberty in A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle (1637/45). Milton’s poetic map of the uneasy lands around the Welsh border juxtaposes competing visions of the land as massive or minuscule with rival definitions of its character as a Crown holding or a distinct nation. Like the pocket cartography it physically resembles, the poet’s publication is a rebus that argues on both lexical and image-based levels for a British government whose magistrates serve as temperate and virtuous representatives of the commons, acting in relative autonomy within the polity.

This essay shows that small-format cartography of the English Renaissance fostered a geographical imagination that placed nonelites at the heart of the nation's collective identity. Cheap maps, guides, and atlases — a staple of the popular print market — were public forms of cultural capital that charted England as the domain of the commonwealth rather than the Crown. This archive, which has been neglected in favor of beautifully illustrated, large-format cartography, reveals very different conceptions of how space, place, and nationhood intersected. At the dawn of the realm's transition into a modern nation-state, these cheap prints recalibrated the English topography to accommodate an expansive body politic. The essay ends with an exploration of how old and new archival research methods may together be deployed to continue excavating the material evidence of England's ordinary Renaissance.

If maps are instruments of power, then it matters that in Renaissance Britain they were often found in the pockets of ordinary people. Pocket Maps and Public Poetry in the English Renaissance demonstrates how early modern British poets paid by the state adapted inclusive modes of nationhood charted by inexpensive, small-format maps. It places chapbooks (“cheapbooks”) by Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Ben Jonson, William Davenant, and John Milton into conversation with the portable cartography circulating in the same retail print industry. Domestic pocket maps were designed for heavy use by a broad readership that included those on the fringes of literacy. The era’s de facto laureates all banked their success as writers appealing to this burgeoning market share by drawing the nation as the property of the commonwealth rather than the Crown. This book investigates the accessible world of small-format cartography as it emerges in the texts of the poets raised in the expansive public sphere in which pocket maps flourished. It works at the intersections of space, place, and national identity to reveal the geographical imaginary shaping the flourishing business of cheap print. Its placement of poetic economies within mainstream systems of trade also demonstrates how cartography and poetry worked together to mobilize average consumers as political agents. This everyday form of geographic poiesis was also a strong platform for poets writing for monarchs and magistrates when their visions of the nation ran counter to the interests of the government.

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Chapter 4 begins by placing Davenant’s first laureate chapbook Madagascar (1638) into conversation with the popular pocket atlases of the 1620s and 1630s to argue that the poet’s imagistic “Numbers” map links between geographical precision and societal betterment. As he argues in his Discourse on Gondibert (his Sidneian defense of poesy), Davenant believed that the numerical structure of poetry could speak to a broad public sphere defined by its constituents’ numeracy, at a time when numbers were emerging as a prime language for measuring the shifting British landscape. Davenant’s royalist carto-poiesis reemerges in his chart of London as the “Royall city” in King Charles his Augusta (1648) on the eve of the regicide. His work to remap monarchical prerogative onto the national topography constituted a deliberate challenge to the geographic imaginary of the small-format cartography which pervaded the popular culture of mid-seventeenth-century Britain.