Flynn Allott

Thesis Title: Cartography and the Craft of Seventeenth-Century English Prose, 1605-1700

Supervisor: Dr Kathryn Murphy

Research Interests: Seventeenth-Century Literature; History of Science; History of Geography; Prose Studies; Material Texts and Bibliography.

Doctoral Research: My thesis investigates how four early modern prose authors used the theory and practice of cartography in order to ask various questions of their own texts, and to mark out the possibilities and limits of the literary field in which they worked. Francis Bacon, Robert Burton, Thomas Fuller, and John Aubrey all engaged with the many genres and forms of early modern mapping, and saw in them not only new ways of viewing the terrestrial globe, but also possible models for new knowledge-systems; metaphors for literary form; and vessels for the storage of complex and conflicting scholarly information. Working simultaneously with the metaphor of cartography in these authors' prose texts, and with the specific maps which they owned, produced, and often modified, I argue for a more precise, granular approach to early modern cartographic thought, which acknowledges the multiple vectors of influence which maps had on literary work.

I see prose and cartography as twin forms which, in the seventeenth century, were especially concerned with defining their own parameters and practices, and as such informed each other in ways which illuminated new possibilities for both disciplines. Above all, I stress that my authors responded to cartography as a 'craft': as a product of materially and agentially complex processes, mapping did not only hold literary significance as a 'finished' or perfected geographical representation. I am also Co-Editor of Oxford Research in English, the faculty's graduate-run research journal; and an Assistant Editor at Imago Mundi, the leading journal in the international field of the History of Cartography. My research is kindly supported by an Oriel College Graduate Scholarship, and the AHRC's Open-Oxford-Cambridge Doctoral Training Partnership.

Publications:

'Material Metaphors for Literary Form: Robert Burton's "Perused" Copy of Theatrum Urbium Italicarum (1599)', Renaissance Studies (2022). Available online at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/rest.12847.

Conference Papers:

'The Fate of Philologus: Pastiche, Pedantry, and the Influence of Scholarship on Seventeenth-Century Religious Dialogue', Influence: 50 Years On, Magdalen College, Oxford, September 2023.

'Cartographic and Literary Forms: Robert Burton's Copy of Theatrum Urbium Italicarum (1599)', International Society for the History of the Map, May 2022, Montevideo, Uruguay.