Set against the backdrop of the First Crusade's conquest of Jerusalem, Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata (1581) channels both the aspirations and the failures of city-building and destruction. The poem explores probing questions about territorial ownership, religious right, and the materiality of space, extending from the Middle East to its symbolic New World shores. Central to the article's analysis is Canto XV, whose prophecy of Columbus and his distant voyage engages pre-, anti-, and decolonial modes of thought. This prophecy unfolds as two Crusaders approach the Atlantic island of the enchantress Armida, a space charged with imperial tensions. Although resembling an earthly paradise, Armida's island functions as a paradise-prison, a heterotopia generating what the present study terms decolonizing doubts - critiques and counternarratives that arise when one colonial context is forced to assess another. These doubts unsettle the poem's portrayals of conquest, liberation, captivity, and the epistemologies of discovery. Tasso's emphasis on the verbal and visual proof of lands beyond known bounds exposes the anxieties surrounding both colonial and authorial power. By examining the interplay between utopian and decolonial perspectives, the present article brings into relief Tasso's geographical critique of center and periphery, and foregrounds the pivotal role female artistry plays within epic history and its (im)possible future.
The article discusses how the presentation of the career, arrest and imprisonment of Sir Thomas Overbury illustrate the importance of place. Looking at epistolary material between 1611 and 1613, it examines how Overbury was represented by courtiers, diplomats and commentators in connection to different royal locations. It argues that the rhetorical training of such writers led to the use of places of argument which aimed to guide readers’ emotional responses to the information presented. Having begun with Overbury’s disagreement with the queen at Greenwich in May 1611, the article then moves on to his role in the competition for the position of the royal secretary and the connection of the courtier at this time to the king’s hunting lodge at Royston. Finally, moving to the reception of Overbury’s arrest by those watching the court and his own letters from the Tower, it considers how he uses the same rhetorical techniques in an ill-fated attempt to influence the king’s favourite, Robert Carr, then Viscount Rochester, and secure his release from close imprisonment.
The present introductory article presents comparative readings of each of the four pairs of case study articles. In it, four respondents each offer an in-depth analysis of the connections between a pair of articles and their resonance for the volume as a whole. Each respondent also gestures towards productive avenues for further research which are opened up by the articles in their pair, offering up new directions for the ever-expanding field of space and place studies.
The article examines the mechanism by which space is created and disrupted in Michael Drayton’s chorographic poem, Poly-Olbion (1612 and 1622). Gaston Bachelard propounds that ‘Inhabited space transcends geometrical space’: once space is inhabited, it develops the agency to co-create with its inhabitants. Applying this theory of domesticity to Drayton’s representation of water, the article argues that the poem similarly presents the non-human with agency to shape and disrupt space alongside people and their histories. Attending to the spatial agency of the non-human in this way allows for a new ecocritical reading of space in Poly-Olbion, aiming to address what it means to read space in the face of environmental change.
The article examines Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo's Istorica descrizione de' tre regni Congo, Matamba, et Angola (1687) as a key text in the seventeenth-century Catholic effort to render West Central Africa legible within a Christian epistemological framework. Produced under the auspices of Propaganda Fide, Cavazzi's chronicle translates African political sovereignty-most notably that of Queen Njinga of Matamba-into a moralized narrative of sin, conversion, and redemption. Drawing on Cavazzi's firsthand experience as Njinga's confessor, as well as the visual regime established by Paolo da Lorena's engravings, the article shows how admiration and censure coexist within missionary representation. Rather than dismissing such accounts as purely didactic or exploitative, the present essay situates them within a broader historiographical dialogue that includes the more empathetic portrayals of Antonio da Gaeta and Francesco Maria Gioia, as well as modern historical reconstructions by John Thornton and Linda Heywood. Mobilizing theoretical frameworks from Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, Martin Jay, and Robyn Wiegman, the article analyzes how space, vision, and racialized visibility structure missionary knowledge. It argues that Capuchin texts functioned simultaneously as ethnographic records and performative scripts that sought to regulate bodies and territories, yet inadvertently opened sites of negotiation and resistance.
