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descent, which topographers attempted to trace through their reconstructions of linguistic history, did not offer an easy solution either. The myth that Britain owed its founding to the wandering Trojan hero Brutus was increasingly being understood as just that, a myth.³ As Colin Kidd has observed, history (as seventeenth-century antiquaries understood it) increasingly suggested that the various peoples of Britain descended from different waves of invaders: Celtic peoples, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, and Normans, to name a few of the groups who arrived over the millennia and left their mark on the cultural, linguistic, natural, and built landscape of Britain.⁴ Edward Lhuyd, mapping the descent of the peoples of Britain from the histories of their languages, eliminated England entirely and created a Britain defined wholly by relationships between the Celtic peoples.

      Beyond these options, Britain might also be defined by commerce and trade ties: topographies of trade held in productive tension local particulars and national visions. Topographers both observed and promoted trade connections, participating in a long process by which local markets across Britain became more interconnected.⁵ Each region of Britain, each county and each nation, had its distinctive products, but these were traded around the islands as a whole and even internationally. In their work on trade, topographers constructed an image of the local as enmeshed in the national.

      In addition there was Ogilby’s “politique division of princes,” which in practice often meant defining “Britain” by the extension of English political hegemony and the incorporation (willingly and unwillingly) of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland into the project of building a “British” Empire.⁶ Camden’s Britannia, which was published in six revised and enlarged editions within its author’s lifetime (1551–1623), led the way in this regard. Pitching his work directly at James I in the 1610 English translation, he wrote that “the glory of my country encouraged me to undertake” to “restore antiquity to Britaine, and Britain to his antiquity.”⁷ A century later Edmund Gibson’s revised Britannia (1695) covered the same territory.⁸ In the dedicatory letter to John Somers, a counselor to William III, Gibson proclaimed that “Descriptions of Countries” were among the most pleasing of scholarly endeavors, as they allowed one to express “one’s Love for his Native Country.”⁹ In using the name Britannia, a word whose origins lay deep in the classical past, Camden and later authors attempted to proclaim the unity of the peoples and lands of the “Atlantic archipelago.”¹⁰ But from Camden’s perspective, Britain was not a fraternity of equals; Camden’s was an Anglo-centric unity. The 1695 revision, like the original, largely constructed Britain from an English perspective, devoting more attention to England than Ireland, Scotland, and Wales combined.

      Bookended by the first English translation of Britannia and its revision were a number of projected and completed natural historical, antiquarian, and topographical studies with “Britannia” or “Britain” featured prominently in their titles.¹¹ Although the publication dates of these books spanned a century, they represented an interconnected corpus in that earlier works continued to be read and were often extensively quoted or paraphrased in later works. Most prominently Camden served later writers as both a source of information and a foundation upon which to build. Through the century, the replication (with variations) of Camden’s text across different “authors” helped to establish it as a somewhat stable version of the topographical Britain, one oriented toward an English readership.¹² Regional writers with a narrower focus, such as Richard Carew, author of a 1602 study of Cornwall, continued to be cited as well. In his Britannia Baconica (1660) Joshua Childrey quoted both Camden and Carew for material beyond his own sphere of local knowledge. Indeed, Childrey quoted the thirteenth-century topographer Gerald of Wales, hinting at the deep historical continuities between early modern writings and medieval, as well as classical, precedents.

      This chapter maps the lineaments of the topographical Britain. Natural historical and antiquarian writing offered a range of possibilities for conceptualizing Britain as an object of learned inquiry. It also drew on and intervened in contemporaneous debates about Britain as a political object, both explicitly and implicitly. The two, in fact, were not separate projects: because naturalists and antiquaries took into their remit languages, settlement patterns, trade, the distribution of natural resources, and local customs, in defining Britain as an object of topographical inquiry, they sketched its political and cultural outlines as well. Though topographers may have had dreams of a comprehensive, unified account of British nature and antiquities—a “whole body and book” that could serve as the foundation for a unified country—their works presented a more mixed picture, reflecting the political and social discourses of the day.

      In particular, in their work topographers writing in the Britannia tradition attempted to hold in productive tension the competing forces that bound and drove apart England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Their ideal was a national vision composed of local particulars, rather than national visions that regularized or stamped out local particulars. Though regional diversity could function to stymie the formation of “Britain,” topographers attempted to understand it as a source of unity, whether that meant mapping local contributions to the national economy or looking for the hidden connections between the Celtic languages and peoples. This did not mean that topographers were univocal in their concept of Britain. Some chose loyalty to their individual region, or even county, over loyalty to “Britain,” never mind England, Scotland, Wales, or Ireland. In some cases English naturalists wrote about Wales, Scotland, and Ireland without knowing much about local particulars in those places. In some cases they were aware of this and apologetic about it—in the 1610 English translation of Britannia, dedicated to James I, Camden was reluctant to hold forth on Scottish antiquities—out of respect, he claimed, for those whose knowledge was deeper and more detailed. In other cases they were ignorant and hostile, often within the same book—Camden’s attitude toward Catholic Ireland reflected this combination.

      Part of the work of this chapter is thus parsing out what “national” and “local” meant to topographical writers of diverse backgrounds following diverse lines of inquiry. In doing so, I hope this chapter complicates a tempting narrative: that the formation of “Britain” as a nation was a process driven solely by the English, or perhaps the English in concert with the Scots.¹³ Certainly the English took the largest role in defining the topographical Britain and liked to see themselves as the driving imperial power behind the creation of Great Britain.¹⁴ Latter-day historical scholarship on early modern topographical and antiquarian scholarship has also tended both to privilege the English perspective and isolate the English, Welsh, Irish, and Scottish traditions from each other, deemphasizing connections between them and perhaps unintentionally reinforcing a narrative of English dominance.¹⁵ What this chapter argues, however, is that Welsh, Scottish, and Anglo-Irish naturalists were by no means passive bystanders in the debates about the topographical Britain; rather they were crucial contributors (though the Catholic Irish and Highland Scots were largely, though not entirely, shut out of the process).

      Ultimately, I argue that the images of Britain that these topographers created, in both their unity and their disunity, were grounded in the dispersed collaborative medium in which they worked, their correspondence. The quotation of this chapter’s title speaks to this relationship between printed visions and topographical investigators joined in correspondence. As explored in greater detail below, Joshua Childrey, in his Britannia Baconica, argued that his book reflected to Britons an image of themselves: “This book,” he wrote, “doth not shew you a Telescope, but a Mirror.”¹⁶ Visions of Britain such as Childrey’s were reflections of the correspondence through which they came into being. In the mirror of print, naturalists’ and antiquaries’ correspondence was made visible.

      A Shared Landscape

      One seemingly straightforward path to defining Britain led along the seashore, the idea being that the geographically contiguous lands of Wales, England, and Scotland could be considered “Britain.” This approach had the advantage of seeming natural: the limits of Britain were those set by the sea. Yet it faced several complications, including political tensions between Scotland and England and English topographers’ limited knowledge of Scotland and Wales. Digging into these works, we also see tension between the national definition of

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