Elizabethan Globalism

In August 1592, Robert Cecil rode to Dartmouth by night, rushing to oversee the unloading of cargo from an immense Portuguese carrack, the Madre de Dios, captured by the English in the Azores. Pearls, silk, spices, oils and porcelain flooded the English market, the royal treasury and Cecil’s private cabinet. The smell of musk, Cecil wrote, perfumed everyone he crossed within seven miles of Exeter. Like the trail of incense leading Cecil to the ship, Matthew Dimmock’s book draws its readers through the alluring material culture of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. This is no insular world: the flow of goods, letters and travellers connect Dartmouth and London to Sumatra, Java, Aceh, Persia, Ethiopia. The book brims with beautifully reproduced images on every page. Non-European illuminated manuscripts and artworks situated alongside late Elizabethan and Jacobean visual culture demonstrate the ‘belated engagement [of the English] with the world that was

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