Re-fighting the English Revolution: John Nalson (1637–1686) and the Frustrations of Late Seventeenth-Century English Historiography

The English Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century went on being re-fought and reinterpreted long after the original events were over. In the later part of the reign of Charles II, fuelled by the Exclusion Crisis and the Popish Plot and the early strivings of Whigs and Tories, histories of the Civil Wars, Interregnum and Restoration took on a new lease of life and gained added purpose and relevance. John Nalson (1637–1686) is firmly anchored in this period and took up his pen in the re-drawn political and religious battle-lines. This article offers a reassessment of this neglected polemicist and historian, placing him within the context of his times and the intense rhetoric and rivalries to which it gave rise. It examines Nalson's output in relation to other writers of the age—Hobbes, Filmer and Rushworth among them—and takes stock of his changing reputation.     

Francisco Faleiro and Scientific Methodology at the Casa de la Contratación in the Sixteenth Century

Henricus Martellus's four world maps of c.1489 show a non‐existent Asian peninsula east of the Aurea Chersonesus (the Malay peninsula). For some decades a group of scholars in Latin America has been claiming that this so‐called ‘Dragon's Tail’ peninsula is really a pre‐Columbian map of South America. In this paper, the cartographical and place‐name evidence is examined, showing that the identification has not been proved, and that perceived similarities between the river and coastal outlines on this ‘Dragon's Tail’ peninsula and those of South America are fortuitous. Ptolemy's depiction of an enclosed Indian Ocean was invalidated when Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope. Consequently, a year or two later, Martellus adapted the east Asian section of Ptolemy's world map, providing China with an east coast and turning the southward extension of Asia into a peninsula. The non‐Ptolemaic place‐names on these maps were derived from Marco Polo's writings.