Cartographic Arrest: Harvey, Raleigh, Drayton and the Mapping of Sense

Abstract

The body, the body corporeal, was for many the chosen metaphor for the experience of the English early modern world. In its commonplace details, its mutable features and significances, its elaborate evidence of universal tendencies and local distinctions, the figure of the body, as both a real and imaginary entity, provided a ready map for reading, interpreting and comprehension. Yet the very idea of a map, with its implicit dependence upon the survey of a stable terrain, fixed referents and measurement, seems to contradict the palpable flux and fluidity of life. Maps are full of references and indications but they are not peopled. In order to get around an actual body, to explore its viscera, its textures and tissues, a map was certainly needed by the seventeenth-century anatomist. But that intellectual orientation, that kind of ‘mental map’, no more than a text or an illustration would have exhausted the reality that would be confronted in the Anatomy Theatre.² A mental map, as with any map, implies a rationalisation of space and of time: its signs and images are also temporal indices. It permits the grasping of an outline, a shape, some sort of location, but not the contexts, customs, histories, languages, experiences, hopes and desires that course through the body, even after death. The latter would have pierced the logic of topography and spilt over the edges of the anatomist’s ‘map’.

Just as in a very small commonwealth [there is] the same judge, king, adviser, so in larger they are separate, and politicians [can acquire] many examples from our art.

William Harvey¹