This chapter provides a basic introduction to Cambridge Platonism and its four central figures: Benjamin Whichcote (1609–83), Ralph Cudworth (1617–88), John Smith (c. 1618–52) and Henry More (c. 1614–87). Beginning with brief biographies of the Cambridge Platonists and an outline of the Civil War background to their intellectual development, the chapter then moves to a consideration of the contested nature of Cambridge Platonism in contemporary scholarship. Were Whichcote, More, Cudworth and Smith aligned enough biographically and intellectually to warrant grouping them together as architects of a shared philosophical school of thought? After reviewing several recent arguments to the contrary, the main argument of the book is laid out: Anthony Tuckney’s 1651 correspondence with Whichcote contains important evidence that Whichcote, Cudworth, Smith and More were known to their Cambridge contemporaries as proponents of a distinctive set of philosophical positions clearly inspired by Platonism.

This essay proposes that politics, diplomacy, and a desire for peace were defining markers of Indigenous cultural and literary engagements. European settlers arriving on this continent with an eye toward possessing it wrote off Native peoples as savage and unqualified stakeholders in the “New World” they were forging. The colonial archive, however, almost in spite of itself, turns up repeated instances of Indigenous overtures of peace, presented in traditional frameworks, which can be effectively traced in recognizable patterns from the earliest recorded encounters through to the first major indigenous literary productions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A mindful reading of this archive yields aspects of tradition that inform the outlines of an indigenous literary aesthetic. When indigenous authors such as Samson Occom and William Apess began appearing in print, they carried forward these traditions, confounding settler notions of what it means to be a “politick salvage.”

This chapter seeks to better understand the formation of literary-geographical identities and imaginaries by examining the publications and cultural afterlife of Captain John Smith, the explorer, promoter, author, soldier, and self-made knight so closely associated with the beginning of English involvement in North America, and particularly with the original colony of Virginia. The chapter provides a brief overview of the longstanding tendency to see Smith and his works as belonging to, and even a point of origin for, the literature and character of America and the U.S. South, and how this has made him a political and historical lightning rod in highly contentious constructions of North/South identity. To account for this contentious afterlife, but to also move beyond it, the chapter surveys critical approaches that have since better situated Smith’s place in the literature and culture of Renaissance England. Looking at examples from his major works, the chapter attempts to show some of Smith’s experimental structuring and shaping of oppositional and antithetical literary-geographical imaginaries, which he employed to address economic and geographical challenges for the English nation state in the modern colonial and plantation context.