Sidney and Maps

Abstract Sidney’s writing career unfolded amid a sixteenth-century sea change in England’s relationship to cartography. The arrival in Britain of what historians of cartography call the Cartographic Revolution altered the day-to-day workings of private life, as well as of politics, diplomacy, travel, military activity, and the arts: all of these dimensions of Sidney’s public career. This chapter offers a brief introduction to the ways a sudden influx of new cartographic technologies and materials overhauled personal and professional endeavours in Sidney’s England. Examining several of Sidney’s works (including Astrophil and Stella, various letters, the New Arcadia, and The Defence of Poesy), this chapter considers how Sidney’s writings index and grapple with the implications of the Cartographic Revolution’s effects, especially as pertains to the references to maps and other geographic and cartographic works in Sidney’s oeuvre.