The Poetics of Navigation: The Helmsman and the Modern Mind

Abstract

The Poetics of Navigation: The Helmsman and the Modern Mind traces the development of the cultural motif of the helmsman in sixteenth-century English literature. The emergence of the early modern navigator in England during the same decades when poets were testing the merits of vernacular eloquence created a cultural arena of dueling epistemologies regarding the nature and purpose of authority, knowledge, and action. By examining key literary texts alongside navigation manuals, this study demonstrates how the classical helmsman is refigured to imagine the navigator as a new cultural icon during the age of western expansion. There are two parts to this study: Part I discusses changes in the literary representation of the helmsman in respect to the maritime semiotics inherited from antiquity. Chapter one begins with the Ship of Faith and the pious helmsman. By looking at this tradition, I identify ways Alexander Barclay altered Sebastian Brant’s Das Narrenschiff (1494) in his English translation, Ship of Fools (1509), to query the deleterious effects of cultural institutions and direct attention to the regenerative opportunities found beyond the shoreline. The subject of chapter two is the Ship of State, where I discuss how Thomas More mixes the helmsman of Plato and Cicero with historical explorers Columbus and Vespucci to investigate the navigator’s role, represented by Raphael Hythloday, in creating truth. Chapter three addresses the Ship of Poetry, where I examine the narrator in Book I of Spenser’s Faerie Queene and the prefatory material to Hakluyt’s major works as continuing Quintilian’s legacy of the literary helmsman. The objective of Part I is to demonstrate how the practice and observation of actual navigators weakened the orator’s claim to authoritative knowledge and dialogic methods of learning. Part II examines the literary value of navigation manuals, with particular attention to prefatory epistles and poetry and their contributions to the rhetorical debates on poesis, 1570-90. Here, I explore how the material and cultural dimensions of English navigation enhanced the aesthetic texture of maritime tropes in early modern literature. The manuals highlight an epistemological shift that values idiosyncratic capability and personal discernment over traditional methods of knowing based on classical authority. This section ends with a discussion on courtiers Philip Sidney, John Dee and Francis Bacon. The rise of the navigator in courtly culture provided a secular analogue for the new philosophy where power “lies not with any skill of words,” but with practical, active, experimental knowledge. Despite the abundance of scholarship on the literature of discovery, vogue since Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), few scholars have examined the relationship between poetics and navigation. My study bridges literary history with navigation technology, providing an insightful survey of how navigation inaugurated a new way of understanding the world and our place within it, not as mere passengers seeking a fixed end, but as participants in an endless voyage, where knowledge itself is uncertain, becoming the sea through which we must learn to steer.