Join Lorna Hutson, Merton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, as she considers how early modern legal and poetic texts conjured an Anglo-British sea-empire when no ‘Great Britain’ existed.

Specifically, the talk considers poets John Milton and Edmund Spenser, as well as English cartographers and lawyers, in the context of an international European concern with whether the seas should be ‘common’ to all nations. In the seventeenth century, the pressing question for European nations joining the race for overseas commercial empire was that of dominion over the sea, or of whether the sea was, according to the law of nations, res nullius or ‘common property.’

The talk asks how we might rethink Milton’s poetics of English freedom in the context of Anglo-imperial claims over British coastal waters, revealing the history we suppress when we speak of England in this period as an ‘island nation’. 

Lorna Hutson is Merton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. She has taught at the Universities of St Andrews, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Hull and Queen Mary University, London. Lorna’s work has explored connections between legal and poetic thinking.