For Padron, Don Quijote and Sancho's ride into the heavens on Clavileno is "a satire of Spanish imperialista," a "piece of parodic buckshot" that encompasses many targets, including the "panoptic ambitions of panegyrical [epic] literature cast in a
cosmographical register" (Spacious 1-3).
In the Clavileno episode, therefore, Cervantes does not just mock the fanciful extravagance of romance: he takes aim at the panoptic ambitions of panegyrical literature cast in a
cosmographical register.
These are followed by interpretative essays on the mechanics and means of mapping in early modern Europe: globes, charts,
cosmographical assumptions, the representation of heavenly bodies and their use, how maps influenced forms of writing, and religious thought.
(2.) Catherine Harding, "Opening to God: The
cosmographical diagrams of Opicinus de Canistris," Zeitschrift Fur Kunstgeschichte 61:1 (1998): 24; Michael Camille, "The Image and the Self," Framing Medieval Bodies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 94.
While the illustration of Atlas shouldering the armillary sphere that appears in Palmer's work differs from that associated with Gritti's imprese, the illustration that occurs in Palmer's Poosees would have been familiar in England, as becomes clear by comparing it with an image from William Cunningham's
Cosmographical Glasse, a work dedicated to Robert Dudley in 1559 (Heninger 4-5, 178).
(17) Lamentably, this old chestnut is still oft repeated, and so it is worth noting that the only
cosmographical authority who used Scripture to advocate a flat earth was the early sixth-century Byzantine monk, Cosmas Indicopleustes.
As William Cunningham points out in his
Cosmographical Glasse (1559), early modern English used "worlde" to denote the object of cosmography, the study of the earth and the heavens.
In the preface to his treatise The
Cosmographical Glass (1559) Cuningham explains:
The full Latin title was Prodromus Dissertationum Cosmographicarum Continens Mysterium Cosmographicum ("A Preview of
Cosmographical Dissertations Containing the Mystery of the Cosmos").
Cosmographical Glasses: Geographic Discourse, Gender and Elizabethan Fiction.
Most akin to modern racial theories was the
cosmographical and geographical tradition of the ancient Western world, taught from Persia to the Mediterranean, stressing the division of the globe into climatic zones which influenced the physical and mental make-up of their inhabitants.
