'In this fascinating, interdisciplinary study Tamsin Badcoe reads Spenser’s works alongside the practical arts of cosmography and navigation and considers the poet’s green, muddy and coastal settings in relation to the imagined spaces of William Cuningham, John Dee and Sir Walter Ralegh. By bringing together literary, cultural and historical geographers she explores how the imagination contributes to early modern developments in geographical knowledge. [The book] contributes vitally to the knowledge of early modern literatures and environments ... This complex, highly nuanced analysis of literary and geographical works by Spenser and other makers of the spatial imaginary offers new, compelling readings of The Faerie Queene, ‘Colin Clouts Come Home Againe’, A View of the Present State of Ireland, and the ‘Mutabilitie Cantos’.... Badcoe’s brilliant inquiry, which charts the labyrinthine course of literary and geographical terrain and plumbs the depths of the English and Irish seas with literal and figurative navigational tools, is well worth a careful read.'
Jennifer C. Vaught, The Spenser Review

'Badcoe’s discussion of Colin Clouts Come Home Againe is remarkable.'
Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

'...a book that will be a valuable resource not only for Spenser scholars but for anyone interested in the correlative of the natural world to fiction.'
Renaissance Studies

List of illustrations
Textual note
Introduction
Part I: Orientations
1 Strange paths and perspective glasses
2 Movement and measurement
3 Feyned no where acts
4 Compassing desire: cosmography and chorography
Part II: Environments
5 Seamarks and coastal waters
6 Wetlands and Spenser’s ‘personal curvature’
7 Spenser’s insular fictions
Afterword
Bibliography
Index