The Charles S. Singleton Center Distinguished Lecturer for 2026 is Su Fang Ng, professor of English and Clifford A. Cutchins III Professor at Virginia Tech. She is the author of Literature and the Politics of Family in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge UP 2007); Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia: Peripheral Empires in the Global Renaissance (Oxford UP 2019), and a Cambridge Element on Writing About Discovery in the Early Modern East Indies (Cambridge UP 2022).

Surveying the East: Cartographic Poetics from Spenser to Milton

Poly-Olbion (1613), Michael Drayton’s poetic chorography of English counties, which replicates in verse what Christopher Saxton’s An Atlas of England and Wales (1579) achieved in maps, includes a surprising digression: an extended passage on the first mission to India, describing their route from Tripolis to Melaka, “Measuring with many a step, the great East-Indian wast.” Why does the East loom large in geographically-inflected English Renaissance literature? Asia’s importance is two-fold. First, global trade focused on the cloves and nutmeg-producing Spice Islands known as the Moluccas. Second, the East was believed to be Eden’s location. England sought not colonization in Asia but trade.

Examining the place of Asia in early modern England, these lectures investigate how cartographic surveying became poetic techniques for a Renaissance globalism. English spatial imaginary emphasized connected spaces to locate England in the larger world. Spenser makes fairyland India and America. Looking to Marlowe, Milton invokes the Central Asian conqueror Tamburlaine. And Margaret Cavendish creates a polar paradise to mirror the present world.

Representing space as relational, English cartographic poetics bridges the gap between England and the East through images of parallelism, juxtapositions, and palimpsestic overlap.

All talks begin 6pm

April 21: “Spenser’s Map of Fairyland,” Gilman 308

April 22: “Milton, Marlowe, and Imperial Cartography,” Gilman 300

April 23: “Margaret Cavendish’s Speculative Worlds,” Gilman 300

Abraham Ortelius, Theatrum orbis terrarum (Antwerp, 1570), plate between pp. 48 and 49, Library of Congress.