Non sufficit orbem: Geography as an interactive science at Oxford and Cambridge, 1580-1620

Geography was an extremely important pursuit for many men in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. It developed from a general interest in the world as part of the cosmos, a study more properly called cosmography, into the discipline of geography, which was centred on political society and driven by concerns which were both intellectual and pragmatic. This tension between world of scholarship and the world of affairs provided the dynamic which made geography such an important area of investigation. Geography provided a meeting point for the university and the wider world and in so doing helped to change the ideology and methodology of the investigation of the natural world.;Geography was an important part of the Arts curriculum at Oxford and Cambridge in this early modern period. The study of geography was suggested in some of the university statutes and certainly encouraged by individual instructors. The introduction of this study of the earth was in fact part of the changing pattern of university education taking place in the sixteenth century; the growing power of the individual colleges and an influx of a new group of potentially more casual students corresponded with the growing popularity of geography texts and ideas. Most of the students who studied geography did so in the process of following the statutory requirements for the Arts degrees. Many students, indeed, pursued the full seven years needed to achieve the M.A. Thus geography was encouraged and studied, not in the informal stream pursued by casual attendants to the university desirous of a little civilization and polish, but by serious curricular students, whether they planned a career in the church and academe or elsewhere.;The investigation of geography in the late sixteenth century embodied that dynamic tension between the world of the scholar, since geography was clearly an academic subject legitimated by its classical, theoretical, and mathematical roots, and the world of the artisan, since it was inexorably linked with economic, nationalistic, and practical endeavours. It provided a synthesis which enabled its practitioners to move beyond the confines of natural philosophy to embrace a new ideal of science as a powerful tool for understanding and controlling nature. This explanation of the discipline of geography can thus help establish a radically new analysis of the role of praxis, of responsibility to the state, of true engagement with the world, in developing a new philosophy of nature which challenged the questions philosophers had asked about the natural world and changed the very answers which nature could provide.