Topographical Mythologies

Abstract This chapter makes the case for the significance of classical geographical writing as a source for early modern Herculeses. It argues that texts such as Strabo’s Geography and Pausanias’ Description of Greece circulated in early modern England and are an important resource not only for mythological information, but also for ways of thinking about how allusions to Hercules, and mythology more generally, function in early modern texts. The chapter discusses Hercules’ appearances in sixteenth-century English texts with a ‘topographical’ dimension, including Leland and Bale’s Laboryouse Iourney, Holinshed’s Chronicles, and successive editions of William Camden’s Britannia. The chapter shows that Hercules and the complexities of his mythos are used by English topographical and chorographical writers to explore the changing status of British legends of origins across the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and the relationship of mythical stories both classical and non-classical to a specifically post-reformation British landscape.