Uploaded February 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
How did early modern legal and poetic texts conjure an Anglo-British sea-empire when no ‘Great Britain’ existed?
Professor Lorna Hutson 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 17th 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’.
Find out more: https://www.library.gov.au/whats-on/events/englands-island-nationhood-professor-lorna-hutson
How did early modern legal and poetic texts conjure an Anglo-British sea-empire when no ‘Great Britain’ existed?
Professor Lorna Hutson 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 17th 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’.
Find out more: https://www.library.gov.au/whats-on/events/englands-island-nationhood-professor-lorna-hutson
