"Hollar's Prospects and Maps of London" by Simon Turner

CITATION: Turner, Simon. "Hollar's Prospects and Maps of London." Printed Images in Early Modern Britain. Ed. Michael Hunter. Burlington: Ashgate Press, 2010. 145-166. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How were Wenceslaus Hollar's maps composed and published?
• Answer: Hollar was Continentally trained, intermittantly patronized, and scientifically observant.
• Method: Turner considers Hollar's context and challenges as represented in his maps. First, he compares Hollar's Four Seasons to his Strasbourg Views to establish Hollar's education. Second, he compares Hollar's representations of the Globe Theater in London with its contemporary location, to undermine Hollar's claims to accuracy. Third, he compares Hollar's maps, patronized by the Earl of Arundel, with his commercially successful illustration for John Ogilby's Virgil and other classics. Fourth, he compares multiple post-fire maps of London to demonstrate Hollar's comprehensive view of London.
• Assumptions: First, Turner relies on Hollar's dedication to naturalists--eg Hooke--to establish his affiliation with naturalist observation, rather than relaying information about Hollar's own compositional habits.
 Second, Turner relies on a tradition of scholars who base their knowledge of London on reconstructed property measures--a method that is likely to overlook the historical subaltern who constructed an independent London which was lost in the Great Fire. 
• Sententiae: "The work of Mills and Oliver survives: the accuracy of the measurements and the wealth of personal information -- in tandem with the maps -- has been of enormous benefit to historians, particularly those interested in the book trades who, using the publishing  imprints in the books themselves as a starting point, have been able to reconstruct the precise details of the size and various occupancies of shops and related businesses." (154)

Overstanding

• Assessment: I'm more concerned with the possible oversight of historical subaltern geography than with any of Turner's workmanlike article. Turner's thesis certainly does not outstrip his claims, but that thesis does not prominently invite future research.
• Synthesis: Hollar's maps seem to take the opposite qualities of Aston's tetragammatological texts: neither popular nor contested nor powerfully iconographic. However, Hollar's maps at least equally well defined the controversies of early modern London.
  Turner treats Hollar's mythological figures in a fashion similar to Acheson's iconographic illustrations, suggesting that early modern illustrations included multiple layers of representational space, ranging from the strongly objective (map) to the mythical (Mercury). This implicit finding is slightly more refined than Fowler's thesis, insofar as realism can coexist with allegory, yet not impinge upon it.
• Application: The most obvious project following Turner is to examine the politics implicit in Hollar's maps. Or following Fowler, another project would relate the Hollar's visual perspective on London with the dramatic construction of perspective on London--on stage and in print.