Marlowe’s Asia and the Feminization of Conquest

Abstract

In 1507, Martin WaldseemüLler In His Cosmographiae Introductio proposed the name “America” for Columbus’s newly discovered land on the explicit grounds that “I do not see why anyone should object to its being called after Americus the discoverer, a man of natural wisdom, Land of Americus or America, since both Europe and Asia have derived their names from women.”¹ Just over a hundred years later, in 1614, Thomas Campion’s masque for the wedding of Robert Carr and Frances Howard shows Asia wearing “a Persian Ladies habit.”² In both these texts, Asia is inherently and unquestioningly gendered as feminine. Equally, at least some of the men who inhabited it were also considered to be on the edge of the category of the feminine: Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass have recently pointed to the classical tradition of regarding Scythians as effeminate and prone to impotence and possibly pederasty, since Herodotus recounted how they succumbed to “’the Scythian disease,’ defined as ‘the atrophy of the male organs of generation, accompanied by the loss of masculine attributes.’”³ Taken together, these figurings should alert us to two important facts about the way in which Asia is represented in the sixteenth century. First, its representation is gendered; and second, there is thought to be a quasi-mystical link between the land and its inhabitants, not least since climate was supposed to exert a direct influence on temperament.⁴