The Early Modern Workshop is a multidisciplinary forum where scholars working on the early modern period (broadly defined) can discuss their work with colleagues across departments. The aim is to foster conversations that go beyond departmental, disciplinary, and regional parameters, and to create an active community of early modernists here at the University of Virginia. We convene once a month on Fridays, 12-1:30pm, on Zoom. If you would like to be added to our mailing list, please contact us. Please visit our website for an archive of past presentations and for information about future events.
Please join us at the Early Modern Workshop on Friday, March 4 | 12-1:30pm for a presentation by S. Max Edelson, Professor of History, University of Virginia.
“John Ogilby’s Geographies: How a Restoration Impresario Imagined English America”
Our events are free and open to the public.
Please register on the Zoom link below:
https://virginia.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIsf-6qqT0iHNcNJuSgUlOk7pQIsomNw7_a
Abstract
John Ogilby’s America (London, 1671) pictured the New World for English audiences by translating Arnoldus Montanus’s De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld (The New and Unknown World) (Amsterdam, 1671). Like the Dutch original on which it was based, Ogilby’s book marvels at outlandish Native cultures and exotic flora and fauna, enticing the reader with scores of illustrations, views, and maps. This paper examines how Ogilby altered his edition to describe English America in the midst of a second wave of colonization in North America and the West Indies. It focuses attention on five new images that Ogilby created as well as the new texts that he added to accompany them. Ogilby pictured America as populous, mysterious, and brimming with life--a space that invited a new generation of colonial settlers to give such abundance form and purpose. In doing so, he created an influential vision of a rising English empire in America.
S. Max Edelson is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (2006) and The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America before Independence (2017). His current book project is titled “Restoration America: Founding Colonies and Making Maps at the Edges of Empire, 1650-1725.”