Between Ship and Library: Global Knowledge and Spaces of Exchange at the Middle Temple, 1586–1636
摘要
This chapter establishes the connections—literary, imaginative, and actual—between innsmen and the wider world. Working and Stevenson explore innsmen’s roles in the nascent ‘empire’, acting in legal, political, and administrative roles in relation to newly ‘discovered’ or colonised places, and consider the relationship between travel knowledge and innsmen’s sociability. Locating this work at Middle Temple, Working and Stevenson map their chapter across small, communal spaces and their connections to wider global networks. Focusing first on chambers and libraries, they analyse the interactions between innsmen in these spaces, and the shared ideas behind, for example, the fascination for travel in Ashley’s founding library collection and the Ortelius map in the chamber of Hakluyt the elder. Moving into the halls, the chapter looks at the centrality of travel and trade to plays such as Twelfth Night and the Prince of Love revels performed there. Finally, the chapter turns to Temple Church, and to William Crashaw’s use of his sermons in that pulpit to promote colonisation in Virginia.