The Cartographic Imagination in Early Modern England: Re-writing the World in Marlowe, Spenser, Raleigh and Marvell, by D. K. Smith. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008. Pp. 254. Hardback, $99.95. Over the last decade or so, a number of influential histories of early modern cartography have forged compelling links between early modern English and place, such as, to name just two, Andrew McRae's 1996 The Map of Agrarian England, 1500-1660, and Lesley Cormack's 1997 Charting an Empire: Geography at the English Universities, 1580-1620. These and other studies have rendered virtually impossible any effort to talk about early modern England's status as a nation or an emergent empire without also taking into account developments in early modern English cartography - its growing preoccupation with increased precision in scope, scale, perspective, and the accurate measuring of space. Fueling this spatial preoccupation were the sophisticated advances in theoretical mathematics (and their subsequent pragmatic applications to the growing science of navigation), and more accurate techniques for surveying the land. Because these technological advances were becoming available to an increasingly literate public, they also created ever greater desires for cartographic precision and accuracy. Cartography, in short, became a national imperative. Perhaps the first study of the matrix of the new cartography, the new sense of ideological nationalism this cartography engendered, and the imaginative space of literature was Richard Helgerson's landmark 1992 Forms of Nationhood, and, more recently, Andrew Gordon/Bernhard Klein's 2001 collection Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern England and Ireland. More particularly, John Gillies' s 1994 Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference and Garrett Sullivan's 1998 The Drama of Landscape have, among others, been instrumental in positioning early modern English drama within the ways in which the new cartography enabled the imagining of space. Picking up where these studies have left off, D. K. Smith's book delves further into the following overarching questions: how did early modern English literature reflect this new spatial organization, what Smith terms early modern England's And how did this emergent spatial consciousness work its way into, or become assimilated by, the early modern English prose, poetic, and dramatic imagination? The third and fifth chapters of Smith's book are, respectively, studies of Spenser's The Faerie Queene and studies of Marvell's poems Bermudas and Upon Appleton House. Because readers of this journal will, in all likelihood, be more interested in Smith's discussion of drama, I will offer only brief summaries of these chapters. Smith's third chapter offers valuable insights into the relationship between geography and allegory, i.e., how Spenser converts the vague geographical of medieval romance into a less fictive, mappable allegory of Fairy Land. The fifth chapter investigates how the intriguing collisions between old and new world maps made their way into Marvell's geographic poetry. Smith exposes the tensions between the demands of cartographical precision and the growing anxieties and uncertainties spawned by mid-seventeenth-century political upheavals (the English Revolution, regicide, etc. …