Truth and Travel: The Principal Navigations and ‘Thule, the Period of Cosmographie’

16 Bacon wrote, ‘[a]nother kind of Mixed History is the History of cosmography; which is indeed mixed of many things; of Natural History, in respect of the regions themselves, their sites and products; of History Civil, in respect of the habitations, governments, and manners of the people; and of Mathematics, in respect of the climates and configurations of the heavens, beneath which the regions o. [...] Thule was often believed to be Iceland, as the northernmost region of the habitable world to ancient Greek geographers; it was first mentioned in Polybius’s account of the voyage of Pytheas.43 In his dedication to Robert Cecil, Hakluyt wrote that the ‘sweet studie of the historie of Cosmographie’ was the current limit of the mappable universe.44 Yet as Seneca predicted, one day the known world wou. [...] The compositional tropes of the madrigal form bring the reality of the text into the realm of fantasy (without the need for allegorical veil), musically rendering the New World as a suspended space of imaginative possibility. [...] The response elicited through wonder is how knowledge, both of ourselves and the external world, is created.82 The making of truth through juxtaposition was a process that was necessary to both science and fiction in the production of knowledge.83 As ultimately knowledge of the self is still a type of knowledge, it makes sense that the process through which we build consensual truth about the worl. [...] By juxtaposing the external wonder of the New World with the inward wonder of the self (mediated by the word ‘seeme’) the text of ‘Thule’ highlights contemporary thought about the role of sensing and the self in the creation of new knowledge.84 The heart of the ‘Thule’ poem is the wonder of the human self.