Peter Whitfield – författare

First Published in 1998. An exploration narrative can be a tale of adventure and endurance, a technical account of navigation and seamanship, or a political history of the overseas empires that were built up in the wake of the explorers.In New Found Lands, Peter Whitfield takes a different approach. By focusing on the maps that the explorers themselves used, Whitfield reveals how the both the explorers and their patrons understood their expanding world and their place in it, what they were seeking and how they thought they could achieve it, and how they integrated new knowledge into their evolving world view.The maps in New Found Lands present the geographical ideas of the time, making plain the power that came with increasing technical and geographical knowledge. They also serve as evocative and poignant reminders of the limited knowledge of these explorers. For up until very recent times, as these maps show, there have been areas of the world remaining to be explored and "new found lands" to discover.This lavishly illustrated book progresses chronologically, starting with the explorers of the ancient world, covering the East, the New World, the Pacific, Australia and the Modern Era. It will enrich our understanding of the voyages of discovery undertaken over the past 2000 years and will delight any map or history lover. Also inlcludes 150 color and black and white maps.

Throughout history people have sought ways in which to map the heavens. From the sources of mathematics and mythology sprang the classic star chart, the finest examples of which are both scientific documents and works of art.In this beautifully illustrated book, Peter Whitfield reveals some of the ways in which the structure of the universe has been conceived, explained and depicted. With examples ranging from the Stone Age to the Space Age - ancient observatories, the angelic visions of Dante, images from the Copernican revolution, the rationalized heavens of Isaac Newton, and modern deep space technology - Whitfield offers a challenging exploration of the tension between rigorous scientific knowledge and the continuing search for cause, certainty and harmony in the universe.This new edition is updated to include a wider range of stunning maps of the skies in full colour, including imagery from the latest voyages of space exploration.

For more than three centuries Oxford has been the subject of fine illustrated books and engraved prints. These exquisitely made illustrations have become part of the historical record, showing how Oxford’s identity is rooted in the past and tracing a history of the city’s development through the architecture of its most beautiful colleges and university buildings. Prints made by David Loggan in the seventeenth century show us a university where the medieval origins are already largely overlaid by Tudor and Stuart rebuilding. The engravings in the eighteenth-century Oxford Almanacks illustrate a city dominated by neo-classical ideas, while those of the nineteenth century show an increasingly romantic feel for the architecture against its natural background of sky, trees and river. Hand-coloured etchings published by Ackermann in the nineteenth century and Ingram’s Memorials of Oxford of 1837 offer a nostalgic portrait of Oxford before development changed it into the modern city it is today. The best of these historic prints are reproduced here to create a panorama of classical Oxford, with an accompanying text describing the origin of each building, institution or public event, together with the salient features of their history. Together they offer an instructive and captivating view of Oxford through the ages.

The locations of Shakespeare’s plays range from Greece, Turkey and Syria to England, and they range in time from 1000 BC to the early Tudor age. He never set a play explicitly in Elizabethan London, which he and his audience inhabited, but always in places remote in space or time. How much did he – and his contemporaries – know about the foreign cities where the plays took place? What expectations did an audience have if the curtain rose on a drama which claimed to take place in Verona, Elsinore, Alexandria or ancient Troy? This fully illustrated book explores these questions, surveying Shakespeare’s world through contemporary maps, geographical texts, paintings and drawings. The results are intriguing and sometimes surprising. Why should Love’s Labour’s Lost be set in the Pyrenean kingdom of Navarre? Was the Forest of Arden really in Warwickshire? Why do two utterly different plays like The Comedy of Errors and Pericles focus strongly on ancient Ephesus? Where was Illyria? Did the Merry Wives have to live in Windsor? Why did Shakespeare sometimes shift the settings of the plays from those he found in his literary sources? It has always been easy to say that wherever the plays are set, Shakespeare was really writing about human psychology and human nature, and that the settings are irrelevant. This book takes a different view, showing that many of his locations may have had resonances which an Elizabethan audience would pick up and understand, and it shows how significant the geographical and historical background of the plays could be.