Chapter 5 - Putting the Past in Place: Lambarde's Alphabetical Description and Perambulation of Kent

Summary

Writing about places in early modern England was more than just a fad. Maps, perambulations, county and city histories, and poetic or prosaic depictions of various locales came steadily from the presses and circulated in manuscript; not everyone had the linguistic or cartographic training to produce these chorographic words, but they were consumed eagerly by wide numbers. Several early modern hands other than Nowell's and Lambarde's can be found in some of Nowell's manuscripts, noting place names in the margins. This fascination with place had been recognized by scholars (if not by the editors of student anthologies, which almost never include chorographic works) even before Richard Helgerson pointed out that modern genre distinctions had partially hidden the interrelations between texts seen as similar in the Renaissance and showed that the chorographic phenomenon was even more widespread than had been realized. For instance, Lambarde had been known as ‘The Perambulator’ for years, and this moniker was sufficiently well circulated for Wilbur Dunkel to include it in a chapter title in his 1965 biography of Lambarde without explanation or attribution.

Helgerson's foundational study illuminates the relationships between genres that modern scholars had viewed as separate, but within this chorographic mode, individual works still functioned differently. Ultimately Nowell, Lambarde, and later authors such as Camden wrote chorography for different purposes, although some of the reasons that such studies stayed popular persisted throughout the latter half of the sixteenth century and the start of the seventeenth.