Abstract
Anglican Bishop Joseph Hall (1574–1656) penned an early seventeenth-century dystopian satire, Mundus Alter et Idem (A New World, and Yet the Same), depicting the travels of Mercurius Britannicus, who journeys to the fictive lands of Crapulia, Viraginia, Moronia, and Lavernia, which in turn serve as thinly veiled sites for Hall’s satirical invective directed at his contemporary England. Hall’s union of environmental commentary with geosatirical textual presentation places the Mundus at an important moment in English literary history, and Hall’s conscious denial of his own authorship of the text demonstrates precisely how dangerous this work was. His text also holds the unique position of being the first utopian/dystopian text to appear during the reign of James I. Having succeeded the sailor-friendly Elizabeth I, James I faced the difficult task of maintaining the naval superiority that resulted from the English defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Hall did not think James capable of this. Hall’s Mundus resembles what Michel Foucault’s calls a “heterotopia,” which represents a “space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled.”1 Hall’s fictive travelogue to the “upside down” part of the world inverts this utopian construction, as the Mundus presents a dystopic exaggeration of the messy, ill constructed, and jumbled world that Hall loathed.
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Notes
Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16.1 (1986), 27.
Bertrand Westphal, “Foreword,” in Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Robert T. Tally (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), xiv.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 33.
Robert T. Tally, Utopia in the Age of Globalization: Space, Representation, and the World-System (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), xi.
Bertrand Westphal and Robert T. Tally, Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 1, Westphal’s emphasis.
Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 5.
For a succinct account of the Hall/Milton controversy in the context of Puritan/Anglican debate contemporary to them, see Audrey Chew, “Joseph Hall and John Milton,” ELH 17.4 (1950), 274–295; see also
Thomas Kranidas, “Style and Rectitude in Seventeenth Century Prose: Hall, Smectymnuus, and Milton,” Huntington Library Quarterly: Studies in English and American History and Literature 46.3 (1983), 237–269.
For a full examination of Hall’s engagement with the Theophrastan character, see, Benjamin Boyce and Chester Noyes Greenough, The Theophrastan Character in England to 1642 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1947), esp. 122–135.
Richard McCabe, “Hall, Joseph (1574–1656),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. online edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, January 2008).
Leonard D. Tourney, Joseph Hall (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979), 37.
Frank Livingstone Huntley and Joseph Hall, Bishop Joseph Hall and Protestant Meditation in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study with Texts of the Art of Divine Meditation (1606) and Occasional Meditations (1633) (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval & Early Renaissance Studies, 1981), 15.
For a detailed discussion of Hall’s authorship of the Mundus, see Richard A. McCabe, Joseph Hall, a Study in Satire and Meditation (Oxford; New York: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press, 1982), 331–339.
Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London; New York: Verso, 1991), 18.
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William H. Sherman, “Stirrings and Searchings (1500–1720),” in The Cambridge Comanion to Travel Writing, ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 33.
Robert Mayhew refers to Hall’s “rhetoric of verisimilitude” which results in a “rhetoric of authority” in the Mundus. See Robert J. Mayhew, “Historical Geography 2008–2009: Mundus Alter Et Idem,” Progress in Human Geography 34.2 (2010), 249.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 120.
Joseph Hall and John Millar Wands, Another World and yet the Same: Bishop Joseph Hall’s Mundus Alter Et Idem (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 10.
David McInnis, “Therapeutic Travel in Richard Brome’s the Antipodes,” SEL: Studies in English Literature (Johns Hopkins) 52.2 (2012), 454, 455.
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford; Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989), 254.
Marina Leslie, “Antipodal Anxieties: Joseph Hall, Richard Brome, Margaret Cavendish and the Cartographies of Gender,” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 30.1 (1997), 97.
Richard Helgerson, “The Land Speaks: Cartography, Chorography, and Subversion in Renaissance England,” Representations 16 (1986), 56.
Louis Marin, Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1990), 233.
J. B. Harley, “Deconstructing the Map,” Cartographica 26.2 (1989), 7.
Eric Prieto, “Geocriticism, Geopolitics, Geophilosophy, and Beyond,” in Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Robert T. Tally (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 23.
Graham Huggan, “Decolonizing the Map: Post-Colonialism, Post-Structuralism and the Cartographic Connection,” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 20.4 (1989), 117.
Sten Pultz Moslund, “The Prescencing of Place in Literature: Toward an Embodied Topopoetic Mode of Reading,” in Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Robert T. Tally (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 30.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 12.
C. W. R. D. Moseley, “Introduction,” in The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (London: Penguin, 2005), 14.
For more specifics of Hall’s public praise of James I, see W. B. Patterson, King James Vi and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Robert Appelbaum, Literature and Utopian Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 25.
M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 1st Midland book ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 21.
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 224–245.
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford; Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991), 31.
John Millar Wands, “The Theory of Climate in the English Renaissance and Mundus Alter Et Dem,” in Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Sanctandreani: Proceedings of the Fifth International Congress of NeoLatin Studies, ed. I. D. McFarlane (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1986), 519, 521.
Csaba Maczelka, “Joseph Hall’s Mundus Alter Et Idem and Cross-Dressing in Early Modern England,” Gender Studies 11.1 (2012), 83.
Edward W. Soja, The Political Organization of Space (Washington, DC: Association of American Geographers, 1971), 1.
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed. (London; New York: Routledge, 2008), 8.
John Millar Wands, “Antipodal Imperfection: Hall’s Mundus Alter Et Idem and Its Debt to More’s Utopia,” Moreana: Bulletin Thomas More 18.69 (1981), 69.
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Mills, D. (2016). Joseph Hall’s Mundus Alter et Idem and the Geosatirical Indictment of the English Crown. In: Tally, R.T., Battista, C.M. (eds) Ecocriticism and Geocriticism. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137542625_9
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