The early modern map has come to mark the threshold of modernity. In its clean and expansive geometries we perceive the spirit of artists, rulers, merchants and landlords cutting through the layered customs of Medieval parochialism. And if we do not celebrate this cartographic mathematization of experience, then we mourn it as the dawn of a new age of capitalistic, panoptic discipline and imperialist surveillance. This book re-thinks the role played by mathematics and cartography in the English seventeenth century, arguing the currency of mathematics was as unstable in the seventeenth century as England's controversial enclosures and plantations.Writing, Geometry and Space in Seventeenth-Century England and America traces the circulation of this unstable currency through literary and scientific texts, finding mathematics figured variously as the sign of man's immortal soul and the scar of his corruption. Jess Edwards suggests that this instability rendered mathematics necessarily rhetorical and subject to constant re-negotiation. Yet rather than seeing this instability as a weakness, Edwards argues that it may have offered power, and that mathematics functioned culturally more like Puritan communion silver than the sword and ploughshare of seventeenth-century reform. Mathematized texts from masques to maps are seen as having negotiated a contemporary ambivalence between Calvinist asceticism and humanist engagement, with theirs authors having promoted themselves as artful guides between virtue and profit; the study and the marketplace. Copyright (C) Muze Inc. 2005. For personal use only. All rights reserved.