Old Maps, New Worlds and Transfigured Bodies: The Cartographical Imagination in John Donne’s Poetry

The Old and the New World co-exist in John Donne's poetry as imaginary cartographies in which the medieval and modern conception of space, body and world are simultaneously represented. His poetry and rhetorical imagination develop witty images re-elaborating the religious and traditional representation of the world (i.e. orbis terrarum maps and the so-called mappa mundi) and the new visual configuration of maps drawn by the emerging seventeenth-century "new science” and new geography. In his sacred or erotic representation of places, John Donne copes with the epistemological and figural challenges of the early modern literature, confirming the crucial role of the body – as utopia and as heterotopy - in "enclosing", at least cartographically and poetically, the infinite spaces and disquieting places of the modern world.